Leafr, the market-leading platform connecting businesses with vetted sustainability specialists and tools, has raised a £600,000 pre-seed round led by Haatch VC, with participation from NextStep, Cool Climate Collective and notable industry angels.
With climate and sustainability mandates tightening worldwide, 50 million businesses are in scope to start reporting on sustainability in the next two years—but the majority don’t know where to start or who to trust.
Large corporations can afford in-house teams or pricey consultancies, but small-medium sized businesses—who make up 99.9% of the market—are stuck navigating overlapping regulations, decarbonising complex supply chains, and keeping up with reporting, with limited time and resources. They face uncertainty, cost, and risk falling behind.
Founded by Nick Valenzia and Gus Bartholomew, Leafr gives businesses instant access to sustainability expertise at a third of the cost of traditional consultancies.
Leafr’s impact includes:
- Building the world’s widest network of over 1,000 vetted sustainability consultants across retail, manufacturing and professional services.
- Supporting hundreds of projects.
- Clients including WD40, Freddie’s Flowers, and the UN Foundation.
- Offering a flexible, on-demand marketplace that cuts the cost of bringing in sustainability support by 67% compared to traditional consulting.
- Developing new products and services to help businesses decarbonise faster, such as AI assistants and libraries of rated sustainability tools.
With this funding, Leafr is expanding its platform capabilities and accelerating growth in its core markets across the UK and EU.
The skills gap is the elephant in the room for sustainability. We can invest billions into new technology, policies and subsidies but without access to the right skills to implement them, we risk wasting our efforts. Businesses are drowning in sustainability data requests from clients and new regulations, and are struggling to keep up. We built Leafr to give businesses fast, trusted access to the expertise they need, exactly when they need it, without the huge costs.
Nick Valenzia, Co-founder
Millions of businesses need a smarter, more cost-effective way to access sustainability expertise. Leafr is doing for sustainability what the gig economy did for digital skills. They’re making in-demand expertise accessible at scale, and we’re excited to support them as they tackle this problem.
Fred Soneya, Partner at Haatch
