Higg raises $50m in Series B to accelerate supply chain sustainability

Higg, the sustainability insights platform for the consumer goods industry, announced a $50 million Series B fundraising round. With participation from Series A partners Titan Grove and Buckhill Capital, the fundraising is co-led by technology growth investor Silversmith Capital Partners and Tom Steyer and Katie Hall’s Galvanize Climate Solutions.

Higg enables ongoing improvement of supply chain sustainability—across not only carbon but also water, energy, and labor impacts—with over 50,000 brand and manufacturer users in over 100 countries. Higg’s delivery of breakthrough technology solutions and rapid expansion into new consumer goods categories such as outdoor, automotive, toys, and home goods will be aided by this finance.

Higg’s Series B comes at a time when firms are being held to higher standards for ESG (environmental, social, and governance) transparency and responsibility. In addition to recent guidelines for product labeling and sustainability claims, regulations for supply chain due diligence are now being created in the EU and the US. Shoppers are also looking for more product-level transparency when it comes to the items they buy.

Higg CEO, Jason Kibbey, said that more organizations will be required to have credible impact data about their supply chains in this new era of expectations. The truth is, assessing owned operations is simple. Obtaining accurate data on the non-owned factories that create the goods—as well as the materials and products themselves—is a difficulty for consumer products corporations.

Kibbey added that that’s why they’re so grateful for the assistance of Silversmith and Galvanize. Tom Steyer’s effort at Galvanize is the appropriate match given their concentration on climate solutions, and Silversmith provides experience in SaaS innovation, which is needed to grow their technology. They’re looking forward to leveraging their knowledge to help Higg become a go-to source for ESG data across the value chain and across sectors.

Data on the Higg platform is used to create more sustainable goods, extend worker well-being, and find suppliers with lower impact across emissions, water, chemicals, and waste. It is trusted by large brands as well as tens of thousands of manufacturers throughout the world. Higg provides primary data pertaining to a business’ sourcing and value chain, inside the uniform, similar industry frameworks, whereas many sustainability solutions provide high-level estimations of a business’ impact. Higg stands out in a crowded market because of its unique top-down bottom-up approach to performance data.

Todd MacLean, Managing Partner at Silversmith Capital Partners, said that what the Higg team has done in integrating strong and easy-to-use software with proprietary sustainability data has the potential to alter whole industries. Software is not only eating the world in this case, but it is also transforming it for the better. They’re eager to work with Jason and his entire team as they scale and guarantee that consumers have better environmental and social impact information when making purchasing decisions.

Tom Steyer, Co-Chair of Galvanize Climate Solutions, said that while improvements in carbon and renewable energy are desperately needed, Higg is accelerating transformation across the board. Reimagining consumer product sustainability is a multifaceted task, and Higg’s technology addresses this across the supply chain.

Higg was founded in 2019 as a non-profit technology firm with the goal of developing software for the Higg Index tools (developed and owned by the Sustainable Apparel Coalition). Within the garment and footwear business, this standardized assessment system for environmental and social performance has become the most extensively employed. Higg, which allows brands and their manufacturing partners to easily communicate data, has experienced rapid adoption across the sector and has led to constant improvement in performance scores, serving as a model for other consumer goods categories looking to undergo industry-wide transformation.

Higg has recently begun to host additional assessments, collaborating with the Apparel Impact Institute (Aii) to offer a new carbon management program for industrial plants. Higg has also added advanced analytics, supplier performance dashboards, and product-level impact disclosures to its platform, as well as the ability to integrate its data into external product lifecycle management systems.

Jeffrey Tannenbaum, Chairman of Titan Grove, said that Higg is generating global improvements in labor conditions as well as lower carbon emissions in the world’s major polluting markets, including China and India. Their excellent executive team will be able to explore new industries and drastically accelerate their critical work toward global carbon reduction thanks to the increased capital and strategic collaborations with Galvanize and Silversmith.