- Taylor Francis cofounded a carbon-emissions data-tracking startup in 2019.
- The startup said it raised $100M in a Series C funding round in 2024 at a $1.8B valuation.
- He shared how he pitched his climate-change-focused startup to investors during Trump’s first term.
As cofounder of Watershed, an emissions data-tracking startup, Taylor Francis’s job is to convince companies to spend money on reducing their carbon footprint — even in a political landscape that may be hostile to climate initiatives.
Francis co-founded the software startup in 2019 with two former Stripe colleagues, Avi Itskovich and Christian Anderson, at the tail end of the first Trump administration, which aggressively scaled back climate-oriented incentives and regulations.
At the time, their investor pitch was simple: There’s money to be made in climate action.
Six years later, with the onset of a second Trump term, Francis told Business Insider the message remains the same.
“We’ve been here before,” he said.
In February 2024, the startup announced a $100 million Series C funding round at a $1.8 billion valuation. And January 2025 was Watershed’s “best month ever as a business” regarding new revenue, Francis said. He did not disclose a figure.
Today, Francis said his biggest competitors are Salesforce and Microsoft which also offer similar emissions-tracking services. He said his clients include 60 of the Fortune 500 companies.
“I feel like that’s a problem we’ve earned our way into recently,” he said.
Business Insider visited Francis at Watershed’s 23,000-square-foot office in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood, where his nearly 400 employees are encouraged to come into work.
He told BI he likes to operate in an “old school” way: in person, where people can freely exchange ideas in front of a whiteboard.
Francis shared how he first pitched his company to investors in 2019 and the challenges he navigates today.
The interview was condensed and edited for clarity.
Was it hard getting companies onboard with Watershed in 2019?
Yeah, I mean, 2019 was in the first Trump administration.
It seemed no one had ever done this before — getting companies to spend money on software for climate. People had spent money on consultants, they’d spent money on [carbon] offsets. And I think that the mega trend that we are both riding and trying to accelerate is that climate is getting more and more in-the-money for companies.
That was the pitch at the time — there’s money in pursuing climate initiatives.
Honestly, the first slide of our sales deck was the same in 2019 as it is today. Literally the first slide of the sales deck. It looks better, it’s been redesigned, but it still says: “Software to measure, reduce, and report your carbon emissions, because climate action is good for your business.”
Here’s the thing, I’ll say January 2025 was our best month ever as a business.
What do you think is happening there?
I think that we are indexed to companies doing the work on climate, not indexed to companies talking publicly about their work on climate.
We see now that companies are behind the scenes. When you’re an enterprise software, you kind of get to see the inside of organizations and whether they’re thinking about this in a thoughtful way.
The companies are going about this with more organizational seriousness now than they did three years ago. They’re saying much less about it, but the executive leader who’s responsible has shifted from chief sustainability officer to the chief financial officer.
Lloyd Lee
Who are your competitors?
Microsoft and Salesforce. They have these modules. It’s nice market validation that they think this is a big opportunity, but there’s just a difference in product quality when it’s the only thing you do.
A Salesforce spokesperson told Business Insider in an email that sustainability management is “fundamentally a data challenge” that requires a unified platform. A Microsoft spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
What’s the hardest thing right now?
Honestly, I think it’s pretty pedestrian: enterprise software challenges.
How do you make it a no-brainer for companies to buy a nice piece of software rather than a module from someone they’ve already purchased from?
How do you manage a growing team between San Francisco and London? Two years ago, Watershed was a hundred people, now it’s 380 people.
How do you make sure you’re delivering well for companies at the scale of Walmart who have enormous expectations about this sort of thing?
How many customers do you have now?
I don’t know that we’ve shared that publicly, but we have more than 500 clients now than the 5 clients we had when John Doerr [the Chair of Kleiner Perkins] joined us in 2021.
What was your reaction when BlackRock — a Watershed client with $11.6 trillion in assets under management — pulled out of the Net Zero Asset Management Initiative?
We work with a pretty broad set of the financial sector and I will say that they are doing the work with more seriousness today than when we started working with them.
And so I think there just is this talk-action ratio thing, where a bunch of companies around the Glasgow climate conference came out with huge press releases with big bold claims and had not really figured out the data yet.
Today, you see the pullback on the pledges, and companies — behind the scenes — know what they’re doing. They’ve got the initiatives that they’re prioritizing. So I think the talk-action ratio has flipped.
Is it a good time for climate action in the world right now? No. Obviously the policy pendulum matters and the policy pendulum is not swinging in the right direction. But — behind the scenes with companies — I think people are doing more, even though they’re talking less.
