Persefoni's ERP for Carbon
Ryan Miller, VP & GM of Private Markets at Persefoni, on building an ERP for carbon
Calling this the ERP for carbon means Persefoni is trying to turn emissions work from a yearly consulting project into a repeatable finance workflow. The core shift is that companies still gather raw data from facilities, travel, procurement, and suppliers, but the software handles the emissions factors, calculations, audit trail, and reporting logic. That makes carbon measurement cheaper, more frequent, and much easier to run inside the CFO org instead of through spreadsheet heavy outside projects.
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The product maps closely to financial software in how teams use it. Finance and operations teams feed in activity data, the system converts it into CO2e using embedded calculation logic, and companies can run monthly or quarterly closes instead of scrambling once a year. Persefoni explicitly positions this as a ledger style system with formula level traceability.
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This also changes who does the work. Historically, consultants assembled spreadsheets and matched each input to an emissions factor. In software, that mechanical work gets automated, so consultancies like Bain and CGI can shift toward decarbonization planning and disclosure strategy, much like lawyers benefited when cap table software took over manual recordkeeping.
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The broader market has validated this category, but competition is splitting by workflow. Persefoni has leaned hard into auditability and financed emissions for banks and asset managers, while peers like Watershed and Sweep pitch broader enterprise sustainability platforms. That makes the carbon system of record, especially for finance teams, the strategic control point.
The next step is for carbon software to stop being just a reporting tool and become an operating system for decisions. As disclosure rules spread and companies want product, supplier, and portfolio level emissions data in near real time, the winners will be the platforms that become the trusted ledger underneath planning, procurement, financing, and climate target setting.