YKO.EARTH — SEED ROUND 2026
The system of record for sustainability evidence. One upload in — buyer-ready answers out. Built for the mid-market SME that regulation just reached and enterprise software never served.
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The Problem
“Scope 3 reporting is becoming mandatory — and the workflow for doing it is fundamentally broken.”
Buyers ask. Regulators verify. Investors diligence. Every one of them needs the same sustainability data — in a different format, on a different timeline, rebuilt from scratch each time. California SB 253, the EU Green Claims Directive, and CSRD have made this mandatory for thousands of companies that never had a system for it.
The evidence already exists. It lives in PDFs, spreadsheets, shared drives, and email threads. An organic certification in a Google Drive folder. A water report from 2023. A carbon footprint calculation in a 40-page document nobody has opened since. A supplier certificate — probably. When a questionnaire arrives, one person spends two to three weeks hunting, reformatting, and copy-pasting. The information exists. It is trapped in the wrong format, every single time.
The result: weeks of manual work, inconsistent answers across requests, growing legal liability, and no persistent system of record. Compliance is real. The workflow to meet it isn’t.
Repeated requests
Same proof rebuilt for every buyer, regulator, and investor. No reuse. No accumulation.
Broken workflows
Structured output requires unstructured manual effort. Every questionnaire is a project.
No system of record
Sustainability evidence has no home. Claims can’t be traced. Gaps can’t be managed.
The Market
Grounded estimates. California SB 253 and EU CSRD create two simultaneous forcing functions across different regulatory timelines. Target wedge: 100K–500K SMEs under compliance pressure now.
California — Entry market
~4M
Small and medium businesses in California. SB 253 directly affects large companies — and pulls thousands of their suppliers into compliance indirectly, regardless of their own size.
Source: CA Secretary of State / SB 253
Europe — Expansion market
~25M
SMEs in the EU facing tightening CSRD and Green Claims Directive requirements. Non-EU companies selling into Europe are included. Fines reach 5% of annual turnover.
Source: European Commission / CSRD
Software market 2029
$7.7B
Supply chain sustainability software — growing at 29% CAGR from $1.7B in 2023. Over 84% of current spend goes to platforms that won’t sell to the SMB segment.
Source: Verdantix 2023
Every existing platform — Sourcemap, Transparency-One, EcoVadis, IBM Sterling — is built for the enterprise. Minimum viable implementation is 6–18 months and six figures. The mid-market SME doesn’t fit. They’re too complex for a spreadsheet and too small for an enterprise platform. That is not a gap at the edges. It is the center of where regulatory pressure lands first.
California is the entry market: food, beverage, wine, agriculture, and consumer goods companies whose retail partners are already filing Scope 3 reports and need supplier data to do it. Europe follows — CSRD enforcement is tightening, and the same companies exporting to the EU face a second compliance clock running simultaneously.
The Product
“One upload in — buyer-ready answers out. The same evidence, reused everywhere.”
YKO ingests existing files — PDFs, audit reports, questionnaires, spreadsheets, utility bills — and structures the evidence inside them. Claims get traced to source. Gaps get flagged. The result is a reusable evidence base that answers buyer requests, regulator verification, and investor diligence from a single source of truth.
Ingest existing files
Upload PDFs, audits, questionnaires, spreadsheets. LLM extraction reads any format. The ops lead uploads once — YKO reads it.
Structure the evidence
Claims get traced to source. Certifications, utility data, and audit outputs become structured, versioned, queryable records. Gaps are surfaced before a buyer finds them.
Reuse everywhere
Buyers, regulators, investors — the same evidence base answers all of them. No rebuilding. Gets faster every year as data compounds.
What this solves in practice.
Before YKO
Ops lead chasing documents across email threads and shared drives. Two to three weeks per questionnaire. Answers vary depending on who answers. No audit trail.
With YKO
Same team. Same files. Structured output in minutes. Defensible claims. Reusable supplier evidence. Less reliance on consultants.
Every data point carries a verification tier: SELF-REPORTED, DOCUMENT-BACKED, or VERIFIED. The structure is honest — it surfaces what is known, what is estimated, and what is missing. A buyer who sees this learns to trust the signal. That trust is the switching cost.
Competitive Position
“The others measure. YKO is the system of record you use before, during, and after measurement.”
| Platform | Built for | Output | Time to value | SMB accessible | Price (SMB) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| EcoVadis | Enterprise procurement | Badge + score | 6–8 weeks | Partial | $1,080–$7,650/yr |
| Sourcemap | Fortune 500 supply chains | Audit-grade traceability | 12–18 months | No | Custom/enterprise |
| Transparency-One | Mid-large enterprise | Supplier network map | 3–6 months | Limited | Quote-based |
| HowGood | Retailers + brands | Product-level carbon | Weeks | Partial | Custom |
| YKO.earth | Mid-market SMEs (food, bev, CPG) | Structured evidence base, reusable output | Days | YES — core market | Reports $5K–$25K · SaaS $10K–$50K/yr |
YKO does not replace EcoVadis. It makes EcoVadis faster, cheaper, and more defensible for the brands already required to get rated. YKO is what you use before the assessment (organizing supplier data), during it (reducing the 40-hour internal burden), and after it (knowing what gaps to close and what claims you can actually make).
The others score. YKO is where the evidence lives. That is a different category with a different switching cost.
Business Model
Three phases. One evidence base that compounds in value with each use.
Phase 1
$5K–$25K
Paid reports
Sustainability evidence reports delivered to a brand preparing for a buyer audit, investor diligence request, or regulatory filing. YKO ingests their existing files and produces structured, defensible output.
Entry point. Proves the workflow. Generates the first dataset. Converts to SaaS in year two.
Phase 2
$10K–$50K / year
SaaS subscription
Ongoing access to the evidence base. Supplier data intake. Live gap tracking. Reusable output for repeat requests from buyers, regulators, and investors. Updates automatically as new documents are uploaded.
Target: Brands with recurring compliance pressure — Costco, Whole Foods, CSRD-adjacent supply chains.
Phase 3
Data layer
Platform revenue
As the evidence base grows across brands and suppliers, YKO becomes a data layer for investors (portfolio diligence), retailers (supplier benchmarking), and regulators (proof verification at scale).
Long-term: the infrastructure that sits between sustainability claims and the people who have to verify them.
Supplier intake is free in Phase 1 to maximize data coverage and reduce friction. Supplier-side revenue (farms and co-packers who want their own evidence profile to share with multiple brands) is a natural Phase 2 extension.
“Every piece of evidence structured makes the next request faster. Every brand onboarded makes the supplier network more valuable. The data compounds. The switching cost grows.”
Traction and Validation
Pre-revenue — Seed Stage
YKO.earth is not pre-idea. The infrastructure is built and live.
Live at yko.earth
Supply chain passport, supplier intake, entity URLs, and gap finder are deployed on Cloudflare’s global edge network.
7,000+ climate organizations in the intelligence layer
Rescued from the defunct environment.wiki — the largest structured dataset of climate orgs available, spanning carbon removal, MRV, policy, biodiversity, and circular economy.
GreenSpecs deployed at greenspecs.app
Consumer-facing greenwashing detection app using Google Gemini 2.0 Flash vision. Shelf-level scan data feeds brand intelligence in YKO.
Retail-aligned data model built
The evidence schema maps directly to Costco’s actual supplier sustainability requirements. Not a generic ESG framework — structured around what real buyers ask for.
30-Day Pipeline
First paid pilot target: a food or beverage brand preparing for a 2026 retailer sustainability audit in Sonoma or Marin counties. Goal is to prove the ingestion-to-output workflow generates repeatable results and first revenue. Warm introductions to Clover Sonoma and regional winery operators in progress.
Projected Environmental Impact
Measurable impact
YKO and Greenspecs are designed as a flywheel: consumer scans surface what real shoppers care about, brand investigations change what companies actually do. Together they create accountability at every layer of the supply chain — from the shelf to the boardroom.
The model below reflects conservative adoption rates grounded in EPA, IPCC AR6, and GHG Protocol emissions factors. Adjust the assumptions to match your thesis.
Year 1 baseline — no growth multiplier applied
CO₂e Avoided
0
metric tonnes
Water Conserved
0
gallons
Plastic Avoided
0
lbs
Equivalent to
0
cars off the road for a year
Equivalent to
0
trees sequestering carbon for a year
Equivalent to
0
US homes powered for a year
CO₂e avoided by channel — metric tonnes
Emissions factors: EPA eGRID 2023, IPCC AR6 WG3, GHG Protocol Scope 3 Standard. Water intensity: USDA Economic Research Service. Plastic displacement: Ellen MacArthur Foundation packaging benchmarks. All figures are modeled projections, not guarantees. Conservative assumptions applied throughout.
Consumer sustainability tools have historically struggled to demonstrate systemic impact. A scanner that changes one purchase changes one purchase. YKO breaks that ceiling: every brand investigation is an intervention at the supply chain level, where Scope 3 emissions live and where regulatory pressure is accelerating fastest under SB 253 and the SEC climate disclosure rule.
The compounding effect is structural, not speculative. As Greenspecs builds consumer-facing traction, it generates a proprietary signal layer — real purchasing intent data from real shoppers — that makes YKO’s brand investigations sharper and more defensible. No incumbent sustainability rating platform has this closed loop.
“The question isn’t whether brands will be required to improve their sustainability story. It’s who they’ll trust to tell them how.”
YKO founding thesis
The Founder
Phillip Carter
Phillip is a city official in Sebastopol, California — giving him direct insight into the regulatory environment that is forcing this market to move. He has deep connections in the Northern California natural foods, wine, and agricultural supply chain communities — the exact beachhead market YKO is targeting first.
He is building YKO as part of a three-platform climate trust ecosystem alongside GreenSpecs (consumer greenwashing detection) and Travel Conservation (sustainable tourism verification). The long-term vision is a trust mark authority modeled on USDA Organic — three consumer data entry points feeding a shared entity graph.
The Ask
Seed Round
Raising: $700,000 USD (~€650,000)
Compute & Infrastructure — largest cost
Production-grade LLM extraction pipeline. Cloud hosting and vector storage at intake scale. API reliability for programmatic buyer access. This is the engine that makes the workflow repeatable.
Ingestion & Evidence Mapping Pipeline
Build the core data layer: structured supplier records, normalized claim taxonomy, verified behavior signals. Goal: first complete dataset proving the workflow is repeatable and buyer-ready.
Pre-Customer Marketing & First Pilots
Brand outreach, content, and direct sales to land the first paying customers in CA and EU markets. Early pilots generate revenue, real evidence packages, and the case studies that unlock the next cohort.
“Make sustainability usable. Make it measurable. Make it matter.”