Business sustainability ratings provider EcoVadis announced today the acquisition of ecotrek, a sustainable supply chain-focused data mining technology startup. The transaction follows a $500 million capital raise last month by EcoVadis, the largest ever equity financing for a sustainability data SaaS company.

ecotrek’s sustainability data mining (SDM) capabilities enable automated supplier monitoring for entire supply chains, based on publicly available data points. The company’s machine learning enabled data collection and classification provide instant data insights for thousands of suppliers, allowing companies to make supply chain impact measurable and improvable.

Rena Kleine, Co-CEO at ecotrek, said:

“We shaped and validated our technology around a deep and growing market need for easing and accelerating sustainability insights. EcoVadis is the ideal partner to advance our mission to help companies deploy sustainable procurement at a global scale. By joining forces with EcoVadis, our customers will realize huge benefits in product growth, ability to scale and enable them to integrate sustainability into their procurement processes quickly for maximum impact.”

The acquisition comes amid growing demand for supply chain sustainability data, as businesses increasingly expand the focus of their sustainability efforts to encompass their value chains, and as governments and regulators introduce measures requiring companies to assess and address adverse human rights and environmental impacts in their value chains.

EcoVadis provides sustainability ratings for over 95,000 companies, enabling businesses to monitor and improve the sustainability performance of their value chains, including their own businesses as well as their trading partners and suppliers. According to EcoVadis, the acquisition will augment its technical capabilities, enabling the company to enhance the quality and experience in its ratings, boost process efficiency for value chain monitoring and engagement, and provide an end-to-end product suite an end-to-end spanning risk classification and monitoring to supplier sustainability performance improvement.

Pierre-François Thaler, co-CEO at EcoVadis, said:

“The acquisition of ecotrek strengthens our position as the optimal choice for companies to drive sustainability impact at scale across their value chains. We welcome ecotrek’s entrepreneurial team, technology and expertise into our purpose and culture. This is an important step forward as we ramp up our investment in technology and sustainability intelligence capabilities that we are excited to bring to our global customer base.”

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