Watershed

Footwork invests in the category-leading enterprise climate platform.

Exceptional companies deserve exceptions.

This has been our mantra since starting Footwork. Our intense focus is on finding early-stage tech companies to partner with, in leading their Seed or Series A rounds of financing. But we always want to have an open mind to break the rules, because there are some companies and investment opportunities so exceptional that they warrant doing something out-of-the-box. This is the case with Watershed, which today is announcing its $100M Series C round, led by Greenoaks, with Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, and other existing investors. We’re delighted to be able to publicly share that Footwork is a Watershed investor, though we have not led any of their rounds — and hence why this is such an exception for us.

Our story with Watershed begins 13 years ago, when Taylor Francis, the company’s co-founder, and Footwork co-founder Nikhil were undergrads together at Princeton. Taylor cold reached out to Nikhil to talk about entrepreneurship on campus, and that began a special relationship that has led to several personal and professional collaborations over the years. When Watershed was getting started, one of their first customers was Imperfect Foods, a company that both of us (Mike and Nikhil) were on the board of, and we heard firsthand about the impact that Watershed was having on the business’s ability to manage their climate goals.

Fast forward to today, and Taylor, his co-founders Christian Anderson and Avi Itskovich, who all worked together at Stripe, have built a world-class team that is firing on all cylinders to serve customers across many verticals, such as Aon, athenahealth, BBVA, BlackRock, DoorDash, General Mills, Medline, Paramount, Shopify, Spotify, and Walmart. In the process, Watershed has become the enterprise climate platform of choice for companies to measure, report, and reduce their emissions. Their customers are managing an estimated 479 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) — more than the total annual emissions of France — and Watershed’s focus is to help those customers ultimately cut those emissions to zero.

A screenshot from Watershed’s website.

So why did we break the rules to invest? Our belief is that Watershed is A) the clear category leader in B) a market that is large and will become enormous (with fulfilling climate goals and regulation such as CSRD in Europe as catalysts), and C) its team is proving its ability to execute at scale when you look at their exceptional business performance over the past few years. Watershed is the only company that we’ve come across in almost three years of building Footwork which has these three characteristics that have merited us deviating from our core strategy.

We believe that Watershed can be “one of the ones,” a company that is billions of dollars in revenue, tens (if not hundreds) of billions in market cap, and one of the most positively impactful companies of this generation. We feel honored to be on their journey. They are hiring across San Francisco, New York, and London, and adding forward-thinking customers every day — please reach out if you’re interested in learning more.