The enterprise climate platform — carbon measurement, reporting, and reduction for the regulatory era
HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States | Founded: 2019 | Employees: ~300-400 (est.) | Stage: Late Stage VC ($1.8B valuation) | Website: https://www.watershed.com
Watershed was founded in 2019 by Avi Itskovitch, Christian Anderson, and Taylor Francis — former Stripe employees who had built Stripe Climate, the product letting businesses route a percentage of revenue to carbon removal. They saw that corporate climate action was bottlenecked on data: companies couldn't reduce what they couldn't measure at audit-grade quality, and reporting frameworks were multiplying. Watershed's answer is the 'carbon ledger' — the climate equivalent of financial accounting software, with the same rigor: granular, auditable, per-transaction emissions data across Scopes 1, 2, and 3.
The platform spans the full climate workflow: measure (the leading granular emissions database, built on real supplier and activity data rather than industry averages), report (disclosure packages aligned to California SB 253/SB 261, the EU's CSRD, CDP, and investor frameworks), and reduce (analytics and a curated marketplace of decarbonization projects, from renewable procurement to carbon removal). Customers include Airbnb, FedEx, Walmart, General Mills, Spotify, Discord, and the Carlyle Group — companies whose filings, supplier chains, and investor demands all run through the platform.
Funding reflects category leadership: $4.5M seed (2020, Sequoia's first climate seed), $60M Series B (2022, Sequoia-led), and a $100M Series C at $1.8B (February 2024) led by Greenoaks with Kleiner Perkins — making Watershed the most valuable climate software company at the time. As California's CARB moved through 2026 workshops toward SB 253 enforcement (first reports covering 2025 data, filed 2026), Watershed positioned itself as the compliance backbone for the thousands of companies over the $1B revenue threshold doing business in California.
Watershed is the clearest 'compliance creates a category' story in climate tech: carbon accounting was a nice-to-have until California SB 253, the EU's CSRD, and supplier-chain mandates turned emissions data into audited financial-grade reporting, and Watershed built the ledger for that world. Stripe-alumnus founders, Sequoia's early bet, and a $1.8B valuation from Greenoaks have made it the default choice for brand-name enterprises — Airbnb, FedEx, Walmart, Spotify — whose suppliers and filings all need the same audit-grade data. The risks are legislative timing (US federal rollbacks, CARB delays), Salesforce/Microsoft/Persefoni competition, and whether 'climate software' stays a category or gets absorbed into ERP. So far, regulation keeps arriving — and so does Watershed's customer list.
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