Context
European SMEs face increasing pressure to report Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions — from investors, from enterprise customers, and soon from regulation. Most of the tools that exist are built for Fortune 500 compliance teams, not a 40-person manufacturing company with one finance manager.
CarbonWise was an attempt to bridge that gap.
The product
A web dashboard where SMEs connect their data sources — energy bills, fleet records, supply chain invoices — and get an emission footprint with enough granularity to actually act on it.
The core loop: connect → measure → reduce → offset. The offset piece integrated a marketplace of vetted carbon credit projects. The goal was to make the whole cycle manageable inside a single afternoon per quarter.
The hard parts
Data normalisation. Energy bills come in seventeen formats across European countries. Fleet data lives in spreadsheets, telematics APIs, or nowhere. We ended up building a flexible ingest layer that could handle CSV uploads, API pulls, and manual entry with equal dignity.
Explaining uncertainty. Emission factors have ranges. When you tell a business their footprint is "between 180 and 240 tonnes CO₂e," they want a single number. Learning to communicate meaningful uncertainty without triggering decision paralysis was a genuine design problem.
Scope 3 is genuinely hard. Upstream and downstream emissions require supplier data that most suppliers don't have. We scoped Scope 3 to "best available estimate" and were honest about it.
Outcome
Shipped to 12 pilot companies across Belgium, Netherlands, and Germany. Average session length was 24 minutes on first login — which told us the onboarding was actually working: people were exploring, not leaving.