In 2006, a twelve-year-old boy walked out of a movie theater, having just watched Al Gore’s documentary about climate change, and felt what he later described as too much pent-up anger and motivation to try to do something. That boy was Taylor Francis. What he did, almost immediately, was contact the organizers of Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project and convince them to let him join a program designed to train adults in climate advocacy.
He was twelve. It worked.
The Stripe Education
Taylor is a co-founder of Watershed, the carbon accounting and enterprise climate software company he built in 2019 alongside co-founders Avi Itskovich and Christian Anderson. All three met at Stripe, the digital payments company, where they ran product, operations, and engineering teams.
It was at Stripe that the seed was planted. Christian Anderson helped launch Stripe Climate, the company’s carbon removal initiative. The three co-founders spent time on camping and backpacking trips, talking about the inadequacy of the status quo in the face of the scale of the climate challenge. They also saw firsthand how companies with supply chains, employees, customers, and real leverage could make a meaningful difference.
“Companies are really the ones with leverage. If you want to bend that global carbon graph, the way to do it is to enable organizations, businesses, companies with supply chains, offices, employees, and customers to reduce their emissions.”
What emerged from those conversations was a realization that climate action would not scale through intention alone. Businesses needed infrastructure: systems capable of translating emissions into measurable operational data, integrating sustainability into financial decision-making, and turning carbon reduction from aspiration into execution.
The Platform They Built
Watershed, founded in 2019, gives companies the tools to measure, reduce, and report their carbon emissions. The platform addresses what Taylor identifies as two core problems: a data problem and a market problem. Companies do not know the carbon impact of their decisions. The status quo in carbon accounting relies on industry-average assumptions, which yields no actionable insight into how a company can change its behavior. Watershed’s carbon data engine analyzes emissions for every line item of a business.
The company is now valued at $1.8 billion and employs approximately 350 people. It helps hundreds of customers, including Airbnb, FedEx, General Mills, Walmart, Sweetgreen, Shopify, Square, and DoorDash, track what amounts to roughly one gigaton of emissions, close to two percent of the global footprint.
Watershed’s investors include Sequoia Capital, Neo, Kleiner Perkins, Greenoaks, Galvanize Climate Solutions, and Emerson Collective. The company raised $100 million in its Series C round. The Series A, notably, brought together Sequoia’s Michael Moritz and Kleiner’s John Doerr as co-leads, the first time the two had co-led an investment since 1999.
What makes Watershed particularly significant within the broader ESG landscape is that it reframes carbon accounting as a core business function rather than a compliance exercise. The platform allows enterprises to understand emissions with operational precision, identify reduction opportunities across supply chains and procurement systems, and connect sustainability decisions directly to long-term business strategy.
The North Star: 500 Million Tonnes
From the beginning, Taylor and his co-founders set a goal for themselves that was deliberately large.
“We set a goal for ourselves to try to build a company that, at scale, can get to 500 million tonnes of CO2 reduced or removed per year. One percent of the world’s emissions.”
It is a number that sounds abstract until you realize what it implies: that a software platform, built in a co-founder’s guest bedroom in San Francisco, is setting itself the task of accounting for and reducing a meaningful fraction of everything human civilization emits into the atmosphere each year.
Building the Standard
Watershed was named the first accredited partner of the Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials (PCAF), an organization that has grown to over 430 financial institutions representing over $90 trillion in assets, and that sets the global standard for measuring and disclosing financed emissions.
Watershed’s operating principles include being customer-obsessed, cultivating diversity and inclusion, and bringing intensity and care in equal measure. The company holds weekly all-hands meetings centered on customer stories, and its most important internal communication, Taylor has said, is a weekly digest of what happened with customers in the past week.
As sustainability regulations tighten globally and investors demand greater transparency around climate exposure, companies are increasingly discovering that carbon data is becoming as strategically important as financial data. Watershed sits directly inside that transition, helping enterprises operationalize decarbonization at scale rather than treating it as an annual reporting obligation.
For someone who started his climate education at twelve, Taylor has built something that now sits at the center of one of the most consequential conversations in global business. The carbon curve is bending. Watershed is one of the reasons why.
What makes Taylor’s story especially compelling is that it reflects a generational shift in how climate leadership is emerging. For earlier generations, sustainability often existed at the margins of business strategy. For leaders like Taylor, it is infrastructure, analytics, operations, procurement, finance, and competitive advantage all at once.
For Taylor Francis, the future of climate action will not be driven only by policy or activism. It will be driven by businesses that finally understand the carbon consequences of every decision they make, line by line, supplier by supplier, and system by system.
