PE & VC Portfolio Carbon Accounting

Help your portfolio to measure, reduce, and report their carbon emissions - with our easy-to-use platform.

Investors need to future-proof their portfolios

Private equity and venture capital firms face growing pressure to measure, disclose, and reduce financed emissions. LPs, regulators, and frameworks increasingly expect robust, portfolio-wide reporting.

But this relies on being able to engage a diverse mix of portfolio companies - each with different sizes, sectors, maturity levels, and capabilities.

Without consistent primary data, firms are forced to rely on high-level estimates that obscure real risk, limit insight, and weaken the credibility of disclosures.

Your portcos aren’t climate experts

Most portfolio companies - especially in the growth and mid-market stages - lack dedicated sustainability teams, expertise, or budget.

As a result, they face a difficult trade-off:

  • - Do nothing (creating reporting gaps and future risk)
  • - Use simplistic tools that produce unreliable numbers
  • - Engage consultants at high cost with limited scalability

Meanwhile, investors struggle to drive consistent action across diverse holdings without adding operational burden to management teams.

Seedling equips every portfolio company with a robust strategy

Invite your portfolio companies to use a guided, easy-to-complete carbon accounting process designed around how growth businesses actually operate. We handle the complexity behind the scenes, so they don’t have to.

Portfolio companies get:

An easy but reliable way of measuring their emissions.
Clear advice on decarbonisation.
The ability to turn a tick-box into a value-add.

You get:

High-quality primary Scope 3 data.
A consistent methodology.
A path to portfolio decarbonisation.

Why partner with Seedling?

Designed for your portfolio

Seedling is designed for small to mid-market businesses - those without a full-time ESG team. We're easy-to-use with an affordable pricing model that scales with the client's size and complexity.

Credible data, not estimates

Our platform is built in line witht he GHG Protocol. It's easy to use but doesn't compromise on rigour. You can be confident we're capturing all relevant Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions from your suppliers.

Value-add, not a tick-box

When your portfolio uses Seedling, we help them turn what is often a tick-box into a genuinely value-add exercise, helping them cut costs and build sustainability into their own sales / marketing strategy.

What our clients say

Hear from our satisfied Seedling clients

“Before working with Seedling, we were managing our Carbon Reduction Plan manually in-house. The process was time-consuming, and we knew there were gaps. Seedling transformed this, making it 10 times faster and far more robust. They helped us achieve full coverage of our emissions and provided expert one-to-one guidance on decarbonisation, leaving us confident in our plan for the future.”
Med Tech
Pete Best
Global Commercial & Sustainability Lead
,
Summit Medical
"We wanted to understand and reduce our carbon footprint but felt overwhelmed and didn’t know where to start. Seedling guided us through the process every step of the way, their easy-to-use platform made collecting our business data straightforward, and the team gave us tailored support to build an emissions reduction plan. Thanks to Seedling, we’ve started our journey to Net Zero with confidence."
Creative agency
Ursula Fairlie
Senior Content Manager
,
Rationale
Seedling gave us the foundations to track our impact at a product level, meaning we can build tracking out for every product sold and very quickly build a plan. For the first time, we have a really clear picture of our controllable operation and product impact, and can build structures to communicate effectively with customers.
Francesca Bonafin
BizOps & Impact Lead
,
Modern Milkman
“As a start-up, I found it really hard to find a carbon accounting solution to suit. Along came Seedling. From the start, I was impressed by their approach and knowledge, and the intuitiveness and agility of the Seedling platform. They’re always happy to respond to my endless questions and work to find a solution, for example helping quantify the carbon impact of our payments product.”
Financial services
Lisa Stanley
Chief Sustainability Officer
,
Zero
"Seedling’s carbon footprint platform is refreshingly easy to use and makes reporting much more straightforward than I would have believed possible. I’m so pleased with how effortlessly it simplifies our carbon reduction calculations, dramatically reducing the time it takes to produce a Carbon Reduction Plan."
Consulting
Emilie Smith
Operations & People Lead
,
Create Change

FAQs

Your questions answered

Is Seedling a good fit for my portfolio?

Seedling is built for small to mid-market businesses without an internal ESG or carbon team. We have clients up to 2000 FTEs. We're less suitable for large multinationals / listed businesses with 5000+ FTEs. These tend to have complex needs and are better suited to working with a consultancy or enterprise-focused platform.

What standards does Seedling align to?

Seedling is built on the GHG Protocol - the global gold standard for carbon accounting and reporting. We also support ISO 14064 measurement and verification.

Do our portcos need sustainability expertise?

Not at all. While we work with many sustainability teams, we also work with leads in ops, finance, HR or marketing - whoever has taken on the carbon footprinting role alongside the day job. The platform is designed with that profile in mind, and there's guidance from our experts every step of the way.

How does pricing work?

Each portfolio company can sign up to Seedling's free plan and produce a basic footprint. If they see the value in our paid plans, they can upgrade - this starts at £80/month.

How is Seedling different from surveys or simple carbon calculators?

Surveys typically collect inconsistent or incomplete information, while basic calculators rely on rough estimates that lack credibility. Seedling provides a full measurement experience - combining guidance, methodology, and automated calculations - so you get robust primary data at scale without deploying complex enterprise tools to every portfolio company.

Still have questions?

Book a demo or get in touch and we'll be happy to help.

Ready to get started?

Book a demo with one of our experts today, or get started right away for free.