Alexis Normand

CEO & Co-founder

Bio

Alexis is a 37 year-old graduate of HEC and Sciences-Po. After his studies, he spent 2 years working in public policy consulting. He then spent 6 years at Withings, a leading company in connected objects. While there, he continued the companies operations in Boston, USA, and created the company’s health department. After the company was bought by Nokia, he joined the startup Embleema by working through Techstars, one of the best startup incubators in the United States, where he developed a taste for entrepreneurship. His return to France was an opportunity to put all his experience at the service of the environment, during a crucial moment in the climate crisis.

Alexis is a 37 year-old graduate of HEC and Sciences-Po. After his studies, he spent…

Company:

Greenly

Location:

New York, New York, United States

Description:

Greenly makes carbon accounting and sustainability reporting precise and intuitive for your company, allowing you to fast-track you transition towards net-zero-carbon economy. The platform enables your company to measure, monitor, reduce and offset your carbon footprint in line with international carbon accounting standards such as the GHG Protocol. We help you better engage your ecosystem, from employees to suppliers, on their climate journey. Greenly helps you roll-out a comprehensive reduction strategy in line with SBTI. Greenly’s sustainability AI helps you comply with CSRD more easily : upload all your sustainability documents and initiatives to conduct your double materiality assessment and gap analysis more easily, report on all your ESRS. Greenly’s technology streamlines data collection & carbon analytics through integrations with over 100 enterprise softwares, including accounting, travel, cloud data, electricity vendors etc. Greenly partners with consultancies to help them scale carbon accounting and support wider climate ESG strategies, including CSRD roll-out.

Greenly makes carbon accounting and sustainability reporting precise and intuitive for your company, allowing you…

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Conversation
Highlights

How Greenly Pivoted Three Times in Ten Months to Build a $78M Carbon Management Platform

The path from consumer app to enterprise software rarely follows a straight line. Few founders, however, have navigated as many strategic pivots as successfully as Alexis Normand, CEO and co-founder of Greenly. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Alexis shared how his team transformed from a personal carbon tracking app to a comprehensive carbon management platform serving over 3,000 corporate customers.

The story begins in 2019 with a simple insight borrowed from the digital health space. Having previously led the Boston office of IoT health company Withings, Alexis understood how to create behavioral change through measurement. “You could create short term incentives for people to change their behavior,” he explained. “You could create early alert systems that could essentially generate savings that would push people to improve their health.”

When Withings was acquired by Nokia, Alexis saw an opportunity to apply similar principles to climate action. “It’s the same sort of tragedy of horizons,” he noted. “The benefits of tackling climate change will be really felt by our children and grandchildren, but we’ve got to do efforts now. So how do you trigger that? You need to create metrics, you need to reward people for making improvements, and you need to generate short term financial gains for people to start moving.”

The Consumer Experiment: 40,000 Users and Hard Lessons

Greenly launched as a consumer carbon tracking app, leveraging open banking APIs to automatically calculate users’ carbon footprints from their spending patterns. The approach was technically sophisticated but faced immediate market challenges.

“It was hard to convince hundreds of thousands of people to do it because it was more of a niche thing,” Alexis admitted. Despite building what he called a “seamless” and “painless” tracking experience, they managed to convince only 40,000 users to connect their bank accounts.

The numbers told a stark story: without millions of users, there wasn’t a viable business model. “If we’re not going to be convincing millions of people, there isn’t really going to be a viable business here,” Alexis reflected.

Pivot One: The Banking API Strategy

Rather than abandon their technology, the team pivoted to white-labeling their solution for banks. Their reasoning was sound: if individuals wouldn’t adopt carbon tracking en masse, perhaps banks could distribute it through their existing customer relationships.

The strategy showed early promise. Within six months, they secured a contract with BNP Paribas, Europe’s largest bank. “Suddenly we had like millions of people who’d access it and a API based contract,” Alexis recalled. “So we’re like, okay, look, there’s something here that’s great. I mean, who signs a bank in six months?”

But success bred overconfidence. When they tried to replicate the BNP Paribas deal with other banks, they discovered that their initial success was largely luck. “We just met the team that was already working on it,” Alexis explained. “We actually started trying to push this to more banks, thinking it was going to be easy, but in fact it was hard.”

The harsh reality became clear through simple math. “There are only so many banks, right? And this contract has a certain size. So maybe it’s a 50 or 100 million total addressable market,” he calculated. For a venture-backed company with ambitious growth targets, the numbers didn’t add up.

The Critical Pivot: Following Market Demand

Eight months into the business, Greenly discovered their ultimate direction almost by accident. “We’re seeing that there is actually a market around carbon accounting. It’s just not for individuals, it’s for companies,” Alexis observed.

The corporate carbon accounting market was ripe for disruption. Dominated by expensive consultancies serving only the largest enterprises, it left mid-market companies without accessible solutions. “In the old world very large enterprises will hire very expensive consultancies to like track footprint,” Alexis noted. “But we’re like, you know, if our vision despite all these pivots remains true, which is that everybody is going to track its footprint, every person, every company. Then this needs to scale through a software.”

Greenly hired an ex-consultant to validate their approach and began automating what was previously done manually in spreadsheets. They started with spend-based carbon accounting, analyzing corporate transactions to estimate emissions. “We later realized that, you know, it’s very insufficient. You need to add a lot more data to do this well,” Alexis acknowledged, “but it was a first venture into the corporate carbon accounting business.”

Riding the Regulatory Wave

What transformed Greenly’s third pivot from experiment to success was market timing. Rather than creating demand from scratch, they positioned themselves to capitalize on existing regulatory and competitive pressures.

The mechanism was elegantly simple: large companies making net-zero commitments needed emissions data from their suppliers. “When companies start to pledge a real decarbonization pathway, what they’re really doing is asking their suppliers to track their footprint and also pledging,” Alexis explained.

This created a trickle-down effect throughout supply chains. “As soon as one of your competitor starts to say, hey, I also sell these packaging goods or you know, these bars of steel, except I compute the footprint and I’m the same price but I’m more sustainable, then this guy wins the deal.”

The competitive dynamic was powerful: companies that couldn’t provide carbon data began losing contracts. “The competitor is like, oh, I just lost a $1 million or euro RFP here because I didn’t have a climate strategy, let’s get one and they find us,” Alexis described.

The SMB-First Strategy

While competitors focused on large enterprises, Greenly targeted small and medium businesses that couldn’t afford traditional consultants. “We looked into the verticals where that pressure already existed and then went to like see the companies that hadn’t done anything because you know, they didn’t have the money for consultants basically. And we hear, oh, we’re 10x cheaper,” he explained.

This approach served multiple strategic purposes. First, it allowed them to build volume quickly, reaching 3,000 customers across four years. Second, the high customer count taught them to handle diverse use cases. “We have something that like basically covers all the corner cases,” Alexis noted.

The strategy also differentiated their go-to-market approach. Drawing from their consumer heritage, they emphasized education over assumption of expertise. “We try and make people smarter about climate,” Alexis said. “Most people don’t know this. I mean, probably it should be part of the stuff you have to learn at school in a warming world, right?”

Scaling and Market Refinement

As Greenly matured, they learned to be more selective about customer acquisition. “We started to learn to understand which of our customers perhaps we shouldn’t spend so much money acquiring because they were likelier to churn,” Alexis explained. “Not that they don’t like our product, but maybe they only needed every two or three years for their RFPs.”

The insight led to customer segmentation based on sustainability maturity. Companies with dedicated sustainability personnel and annual budgets showed better retention than those seeking one-time compliance help. “We moved up slightly and we included more criteria to select our customers essentially to drive net retention up,” he said.

This evolution from pure SMB focus to selective mid-market targeting demonstrates the iterative nature of successful go-to-market strategies. Rather than rigid adherence to initial customer profiles, Greenly continuously refined their approach based on retention data and customer behavior patterns.

The Bigger Vision

Today, Greenly’s ambitions extend far beyond carbon accounting. “I think every company will one day track its impact or its carbon impact like they do their financials,” Alexis predicted. “It’s not that crazy, you know, accounting to a couple hundred years to really like spread out to every company and now you have beautiful software that does this. I think it’s going to happen much faster.”

The comparison to financial accounting is particularly apt. Just as financial tracking evolved from manual bookkeeping to sophisticated ERP systems, carbon accounting is following a similar trajectory driven by regulatory requirements and competitive pressures.

Greenly’s journey from consumer app to corporate platform illustrates a fundamental truth about startup success: market fit matters more than product attachment. By following customer demand rather than defending initial assumptions, they transformed three potential failures into a thriving business serving thousands of customers.

The lesson for B2B founders is clear: stay nimble, follow the economics, and be willing to pivot when the market shows you a better path. Sometimes the best strategy isn’t creating demand—it’s positioning yourself to capture demand that already exists.

Actionable
Takeaways

Embrace rapid experimentation without killing past initiatives:

Alexis didn't immediately abandon previous products when exploring new directions. Instead of completely shutting down the consumer app and banking API, Greenly ran multiple experiments simultaneously. This approach allowed them to maintain revenue streams while testing new markets. The key insight is that early-stage founders should add new experiments rather than kill existing ones, only sunsetting products once new initiatives prove more viable.

Leverage market timing and external pressure:

Greenly's success wasn't just about building great software—it was about timing their entry when external forces were creating demand. The trickle-down effect of large enterprises requiring carbon data from suppliers created natural buying pressure. As Alexis explained, "When companies start to pledge a real decarbonization pathway, they're asking their suppliers to track their footprint too." B2B founders should identify similar cascading market dynamics where regulatory or business pressures create natural demand for their solutions.

Start with underserved segments to build product depth:

Rather than targeting large enterprises with existing solutions, Greenly focused on SMBs and mid-market companies who couldn't afford expensive consultants. This strategy allowed them to serve 3,000 customers and encounter "all the corner cases," building a more robust product. While VCs initially questioned the SMB approach, this volume taught them which customers had staying power versus those who only needed periodic compliance help.

Make complex topics accessible through brand and education:

Greenly's consumer heritage influenced their B2B approach, focusing on education and simplification rather than assuming buyer expertise. Their core value of "making people smarter about climate" translated into clear explanations of concepts like Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions. As Alexis noted, "Explaining rather complex things simply is actually harder than you think." B2B founders in technical categories should prioritize education and clarity over industry jargon.

Follow the economics to find your true market:

Greenly's multiple pivots weren't random—they followed customer willingness to pay and market size potential. When the consumer app reached 40,000 users, they calculated the banking API market at $50-100 million total addressable market. Corporate carbon accounting offered significantly larger opportunity. B2B founders should consistently evaluate whether their current path leads to venture-scale outcomes and pivot based on economic realities, not just product traction.

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