Within a week in July, Asuene closed an $87M Series D led by Decarbonization Partners (the joint venture between BlackRock and Temasek) announced its eighth acquisition in under two years, and layered $19.3M in debt from Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation (SMBC) on top of the equity raise.

The three events within a week reflects an extreme case of what has been happening in the business of climate data stack and integration. The acquisition of Secaro is the latest in a series of M&As across the Global North as larger climate data players look to buy companies and workflows rather than building internal capabilities.

Asuene’s transformation journey

Asuene was founded in 2019 as a carbon accounting platform. It is ranked among the top sustainability reporting platforms in the world, claiming to reduce up to 70% of the workload in developing audit-ready sustainability reports from scattered emissions data. Asuene has become this end-to-end data stack business through a series of eight acquisitions since August 2024.

Sl.No.	Acquiree	Date	Amount	What it did	Why Asuene bought it
1	CoRocket (assurance business carve-out)	Aug 2024	Undisclosed	GHG and non-financial data third-party assurance, run inside an accounting consultancy	Acquihire for assurance expertise; Asuene simultaneously spun up Asuene Veritas around the acquired team and business.
2	E4G	9 Oct 2024	Undisclosed	AI collection and analysis of public ESG data (sustainability reports, securities filings); decarbonization roadmap software	ESG data acquisition capability plus a University of Tokyo industry-academia research tie; relaunched as ASUENE ESG DATA in Jan 2025.
3	Anyflow	Dec 2024	Undisclosed (target had raised ~¥340M / $2.47M)	iPaaS and API integration between SaaS platforms; strong in financial and HR data	Automate collection of Scope 1-3 activity data via API rather than manual entry. The integration layer, bought first
4	NZero	12 May 2025	~$10M-$20M (Axios, unconfirmed)	Real-time GHG measurement, hourly utility data, AI energy intelligence; strong in US public sector	First overseas M&A; US market entry and an operational energy-data layer beneath carbon accounting
5	Sustana (SMBC business transfer)	June 2025	Undisclosed	SMBC’s in-house GHG accounting cloud service	Japan distribution through SMBC’s corporate banking channel, plus a customer base transfer. Structured alongside a Series C2 investment from SMBC
6	Iconic Air	Oct 2025	Undisclosed	GHG monitoring and methane-leak detection SaaS for oil and gas	Second US deal in a year; methane and asset-level tracking for high-emissions sectors under EPA rules
7	exroad	Feb 2026	Undisclosed (target had raised ~$360K)	Information platform aggregating carbon credit and ETS data, news, guidelines, international initiatives	Japan’s GX-ETS becomes mandatory for large emitters from FY2026; regulatory intelligence to support credit procurement and trading
8	Secaro (formerly Manufacture 2030, legal entity 2degrees Ltd)	23 Jul 2026	~$37M	Supply chain carbon data network, 8,000+ companies across 90 countries; automotive, pharma, consumer goods, retail	UK/EU market entry ahead of CSRD and UK ISSB mandates; supply-chain primary data network and product-level LCA depth

Each deal fills a specific hole in the data stack package: energy intelligence, a third-party assurance for GHG emissions and non-financial data, ESG data analysis, API-based automation of data collection, methane-specific monitoring, distribution and accounting capabilities, and supply-chain-network data reaching deep into automotive and pharma. Asuene now describes itself, in its own investor materials, as a ‘serial acquirer’ (self-aware folks here).

Asuene’s Series D has deepened the company’s relationship with SMBC. It had sold Sustana to Asuene in July 2025. It is now lending Asuene $19.3 million as part of the Series D. And under a referral agreement signed alongside the Sustana deal, it sells Asuene’s platform to its own corporate banking clients in Japan. The line of credit shows the bank’s trust in the financials of the company despite the acquisition spree. Asuen’s rapidly expand its market share should be able to service this debt, making this an efficient capital structure in the medium- to long-term.

The rest of the market is doing the same thing

Asuene is the most aggressive version of this M&A strategy; competitors have been doing the same thing to varying degrees. Here’s a list of M&As in this sector in 2026 alone:

1. Diginex acquired Plan A, the Berlin-based AI carbon accounting platform serving BMW, Deutsche Bank, and Visa, for roughly €55M in cash and shares, plus a possible €25 million earnout (January 2026).
2. XeleratedFifty has acquired Terrascope in February 2026. Terrascope is an enterprise carbon management and sustainability platform.
3. Dcycle, a sustainability data management platform developer Spain, acquired ESG-X in February 2026. ESG-X specializes in AI-enabled sustainability reporting.
4. Novisto acquired Minimum in March 2026, a London-based carbon management software company. Less than a year earlier, Novisto had raised US$27 million in Series C founding, led by Inovia Capital.

Deals stretch back across 2025 (Position Green acquired Greenomy, Morescope, Factline in the same year) and 2024 (Gevo bought CultivateAI for $6M in cash, Workiva acquired Sustain.Life for $100M). A full list has been compiled by Joe Pannetieri here.

The strategic reasons for these acquisitions are evident when you study them as a pattern. Nearly every acquirer is buying a geography it didn’t have, a vertical dataset it didn’t have (agriculture, supply chain, energy), or a distribution channel it didn’t have. Diginex, for example, made this explicit: the deal pairs its regulatory reporting reach with Plan A’s measurement technology, and brings two new institutional shareholders, Visa and Deutsche Bank, onto its own cap table. Point-solution carbon accounting seems to have stopped looking like a durable business on its own.

What is prompting this strategy across the market?

Why buy instead of build?

My read: AI-driven workflows are commoditizing the measurement layer of carbon accounting faster than most software companies in the space are prepared for. Calculating Scope 1/2/3 emissions from structured inputs is getting easier and cheaper by the quarter. The harder problem is getting clean, comparable data out of thousands of suppliers, energy meters, and disclosure formats, and compressing it into the specific metrics a regulator or a customer questionnaire actually asks for.

Data integration is becoming the problem to solve for, and it’s the part of the stack an AI layer struggles to commoditize, because the friction sits in the messiness of the source data rather than in the math. Anyflow, Asuene’s own data integration acquisition, and Secaro’s cross-manufacturer network indicate that Asuene has read the market in the same way. They are trying to owning the pipes that connect thousands of disparate data sources and then using AI layers to calculate them to create clean, comparable numbers across sectors and regions.

Two other forces point the same direction. Reporting platforms are bundling carbon measurement into existing compliance suites, raising switching costs on top of whatever AI is doing to the calculation layer. A crowded field of VC-backed entrants from 2021-22 has squeezed carbon accounting pricing from below, making standalone point solutions harder to sustain on their own economics. Geopolitical headwinds since 2024 in the US and conservative government policies across Europe have also made VCs skeptical of funding these businesses since the funding boom died down.

What this means for the Global South

None of the consolidation deals so far involve a Global South target. Every acquirer and every acquired company sits in the US, UK, Japan, or the Nordics. The consolidation war, so far, is a Northern one. Demand drivers for carbon and sustainability data software have been weaker in the Global South than in markets shaped by CSRD, SEC disclosure rules, and a decade of VC capital chasing the category.

That’s changing. Export-facing buyers in the US and EU are increasingly asking their Global South suppliers for lifecycle emissions data and environmental impact “passports” as a condition of doing business, pushing demand for measurement software down through supply chains.

Homegrown regulation is moving too. Thailand‘s Climate Change Act, approved by Cabinet in December 2025, will require mandatory GHG reporting from roughly 3,000 to 4,000 organisations alongside a carbon tax and an ETS. Vietnam‘s Decree 06 already mandates GHG inventories for over 2,000 large facilities and now underpins an operating domestic carbon exchange. Indonesia‘s OJK has a draft disclosure rule in consultation, phasing in mandatory ISSB-aligned reporting from FY2027. India has the Business Responsibility and Sustainability Reporting (BRSR) mandate for listed companies, as well as the much-awaited Carbon Credit Trading Scheme (CCTS) that is expected to generate carbon accounting demand from over 700 regulated entities in Phase 1. Brazil’s carbon trading law, the SBCE, stays on track and mandatory for large emitters, but the Securities and Exchange Commission of Brazil (CVM) walked back its separate sustainability disclosure mandate to a voluntary regime in June 2026.

It’s a matter of time before the large Northern consolidators, Watershed, Asuene, Sourcemap among others, turn their acquisition attention south, once enough homegrown point solutions exist with real revenue and real data assets worth buying. Asuene already operates in Thailand and the Philippines and holds TGO certification for Thailand-compliant carbon reporting, a footprint that puts at least one serial acquirer in the region well before any Global South acquisition has happened. Asuene’s acquisition of exroad was directly linked to the announcement that GX-ETS, an emissions trading system, will become mandatory for major emitters from fiscal year 2026. As Global South compliance markets mature, expect Asuene and the likes to make similar bids. VC and PE firms evaluating Global South carbon data platforms should be underwriting to that eventual strategic exit now.