Retail brands across Europe are under growing pressure to prove their sustainability claims. However, most companies still rely on messy spreadsheets, incomplete supplier data, and expensive consultants. The result is slow reporting, high costs, and decisions based on outdated information.
Amsterdam-based Root Sustainability aims to address this issue. The climate tech startup has raised €1M in seed funding to help retail brands turn scattered operational data into clear, audit-ready sustainability insights.
The round was led by Borski Fund, with participation from Rockstart, angel investors Spotlight and Empower Impact, as well as other private backers.
“This investment allows us to bring our solution to retail brands across Europe. Today, many companies waste hundreds of hours and millions of euros on consultants just to calculate their company and product carbon footprint. It’s slow, fragmented, and outdated. By building an AI-powered platform, we help sustainability teams turn incomplete, scattered data into clean, auditable datasets in minutes instead of months, enabling faster decisions, real impact, and measurable ROI,” said Maud Schijen, co-founder of Root Sustainability.
Turning chaos into usable sustainability data
Founded in 2022 by Gijs de Mol and Maud Schijen, Root is an AI data platform that helps retail brands build and activate a complete, accurate, and auditable sustainability dataset. The Dutch company’s software pulls data from across the value chain and transforms it into detailed, high-quality datasets that meet regulatory standards.
Retailers such as HEMA, O’Neill, and Holland & Barrett already use Root to calculate product carbon footprints, explore emission reduction scenarios, and prepare for upcoming EU regulations, including Digital Product Passports, CSRD, and VSME.
Root’s AI platform ingests incomplete data across supply chains, generating high-granularity insights for reporting, product footprinting, and decarbonisation scenarios in minutes rather than months.
Direct competitors in sustainability software (e.g., Sphera or SimaPro for LCA) lack Root’s retail-focused AI speed and value-chain breadth tailored to EU retail regulations.
What’s next?
The latest capital will support European expansion and further development of the company’s AI capabilities, especially around data optimisation and decarbonisation planning. The company aims to become the go-to sustainability data platform for retail brands navigating stricter environmental rules.
“Root is solving a real challenge for retail brands today: the lack of accessible, accurate, and actionable sustainability data. For example, Dutch retailer HEMA can find out exactly how much impact selling vegetarian versus original hot dogs has. We believe Root is the right team to tackle this issue. Root is building the data backbone retailers need to be successful under new sustainability regulations and consumer expectations,” said Anieke Lamers, Operating Partner at Borski Fund.
