Interview Series: Rachel Delacour

This week’s read time: 6 minutes

Welcome to the Green Digest Interview Series, our weekly feature showcasing conversations with the industry’s leading voices - CSOs, sustainability directors, and other senior professionals shaping the sustainability landscape. Each edition dives into their professional journeys, hands-on insights, and outlook on the challenges and opportunities defining corporate sustainability.

These interviews are designed to be quick, insightful reads, offering you actionable takeaways and a personal glimpse into the people leading the way. Stay tuned for stories, strategies, and lessons that matter to you.

PROFILE

This week’s guest:

Rachel Delacour

CEO & Co-Founder of Sweep

Rachel Delacour is the CEO and Co-Founder of Sweep. With over 15 years of experience at the intersection of data, technology, and SaaS businesses, she previously founded BIME Analytics, a business intelligence platform later acquired by Zendesk after six years. That experience shaped her belief that data is the cornerstone of any meaningful transformation within companies.

In 2020, Delacour and her co-founders launched Sweep, applying their expertise in data transformation to the sustainability challenge. Recognizing that sustainability is fundamentally a data problem, Sweep was built to be the leading carbon and ESG management platform for large enterprises — the key agents of change in today’s economies. A certified B Corp, Sweep has raised over $100 million and works with Fortune 500, FTSE 100, and CAC 40 companies, including L’Oréal, Orange, Lacoste, SSE, and SNCF, to help them build science-based, data-driven climate programs that reduce emissions and create real business value.

Sweep has become one of the most recognized names in sustainability. For those less familiar, can you tell us what Sweep does, who it serves, and how it helps companies?

Sweep is the market-leading carbon and ESG management platform, transforming sustainability from a compliance burden into a strategic business advantage. Our software excels at serving the biggest enterprises - major emitters who are also the biggest agents of change. These complex, global organizations have hundreds of business units, thousands of suppliers, and emissions scattered across vast value chains.

What makes us different is our "upload your data once, report everywhere" philosophy. We built Sweep as a single source of truth where companies connect all data sources, transform them into precise carbon calculations, and use insights for better business decisions. Businesses can track and reduce emissions across their entire value chain while demonstrating clear ROI.

The magic happens when you make the invisible visible. Take L'Oréal - they're using our platform to challenge R&D teams on product carbon footprints, working on shampoo rinsability. Less shower time means less energy consumption, lower Scope 3 emissions, reduced regulatory risk, and improved competitiveness.

We're helping companies understand their biggest opportunities for cost reduction, operational efficiency, and competitive advantage.

When you launched the company in 2020, the ESG space was in a hype cycle. Today, we’re in a more sober phase where companies are asked to show real impact and ROI. How have you adapted to this new environment, and how has your strategy evolved along the way?

This shift toward proving ROI has validated our core thesis from day one. While others were caught up in hype, we built a platform grounded in rigorous data science and business intelligence principles. We knew sustainability programs had to add up to smart business, not just good intentions.

Our customers now tell us that regardless of regulations, sustainability remains smart business. They can't waste four or five years of data collection when they're already seeing returns - energy efficiency improvements, supply chain optimizations, reduced operational costs.

We're seeing concrete proof points everywhere.

That's real money in the pockets of employees with equity stakes.

Our strategy evolution has been doubling down on this business value proposition. We've integrated AI capabilities that eliminate traditional friction of sustainability data management, and we're building benchmarking tools that help companies identify highest-ROI sustainability initiatives based on industry best practices.

Companies thriving understand that sustainability isn't a cost center - it's a profit center.

The sustainability software market has also become increasingly crowded, with many platforms providing similar capabilities. What’s Sweep’s unique edge, the things that make companies choose you over others?

Our unique edge comes from treating environmental impacts as fundamentally a data and network problem. Most sustainability platforms think about carbon emissions in isolation, but we understand that your Scope 1 and 2 emissions are always someone else's Scope 3.

We bring 15 years of business intelligence expertise to sustainability. While others are building sustainability tools, we built a high-performance, secure data platform that happens to focus on sustainability. That architecture handles the complexity large enterprises face - hundreds of business units, thousands of suppliers, multiple reporting frameworks, all at global scale.

Our "single source of truth" approach means companies connect all data sources once, then report across any framework - CSRD, California climate laws, SDR, ISSB,GRI and more. More importantly, they use that same data to identify their biggest business opportunities.

Take HP's Amplify Impact program - they're using Sweep to help their global partner network reduce emissions while strengthening relationships and creating competitive differentiation.

Companies don’t just choose us for reporting, but for strategic transformation.

Interoperability has become a buzzword in sustainability tech.
How do you make sure your platform plays well with others to help companies build an integrated sustainability stack?

Interoperability isn't a buzzword for us. It's an architectural requirement. From day one, we built Sweep as a data platform designed to integrate with existing enterprise systems. Companies don't want to rip and replace their entire tech stack; they want sustainability capabilities that enhance what they already have.

Our platform connects with ERP systems, financial databases, supply chain management tools, and energy management systems. We've built APIs and connectors that allow seamless data flow between Sweep and existing tools. This means sustainability data isn't siloed - it's integrated into existing business processes and decision-making workflows.

We're connecting entire business networks around shared sustainability goals.

We work alongside consultants rather than replacing them. Our platform handles data complexity and automation, freeing sustainability experts to focus on strategic guidance.

The goal is to make sustainability data as accessible as financial data.

Looking ahead, what’s your vision for Sweep in the next few years - both in terms of the company’s evolution and its role in shaping the future of sustainability tech?

My vision is for Sweep to become the SAP of non-financial data. Just as SAP became the backbone for financial operations, Sweep will be the platform that powers sustainability decision-making across global enterprises.

In the next five years, we're focused on three key areas. First, geographical expansion - the US is already a hyper-growth market for us, and we're seeing massive opportunity in APAC, as frameworks like ISSB gain traction.

Second, we're dramatically expanding our AI and risk management capabilities to support broader decision-making beyond just emissions tracking. 

But the most exciting evolution is our benchmarking capabilities. As we aggregate more data across industries, we're building an intelligence layer that tells companies not just where they stand, but where their biggest opportunities lie for both environmental impact and business value. Imagine telling a manufacturing company that optimizing packaging design could reduce transportation costs by 40% while cutting emissions.

Supply chain partnerships will be optimized for both efficiency and emissions. Investment decisions will factor in climate risk as automatically as they factor in financial risk. This is how we will collectively build resilience across our economies as we move into the low-carbon economy of the future.

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