ScopeOnce

Idea

An AI-native sustainability data hub that lets small manufacturers and suppliers answer every customer's ESG questionnaire from one profile instead of re-entering the same numbers into a dozen different spreadsheets. The supplier builds a single Scope 1 and 2 emissions plus VSME Basic profile once, and ScopeOnce auto-maps that data into whatever format the next customer's procurement team sends: an EcoVadis-style scorecard, a buyer's own Excel template, a CDP request, or a portal export. It also checks every incoming questionnaire against the new EU Omnibus value-chain cap and flags questions the buyer is not legally allowed to ask.

Market gap

Large companies have spent the last five years pushing sustainability data collection down to their suppliers, and small suppliers now get hit with several differently formatted requests a year from different customers using the same underlying facts (electricity bills, fuel logs, headcount). The EU's Omnibus I package entered into force on March 18, 2026, and it caps what a large CSRD-reporting company can demand from a supplier with fewer than 1,000 employees at the voluntary SME standard (VSME). Almost no small supplier knows that cap exists or has a way to point to it. Existing tools sit on the wrong side of the problem: EcoVadis and similar buyer-run programs live inside the big customer's own system with no reuse outside it, and SME reporting tools like CSRDpro help a company write its own annual report but do not touch the actual weekly grind of retyping the same numbers into the next customer's spreadsheet. Nobody sits on the supplier's side, owns the data once, and pushes back when a request goes further than the law allows.

Total Addressable Market (TAM)

Bottom-up, starting from a verified anchor: EcoVadis alone has rated 175,000+ companies across 180+ countries and screened 3 million suppliers (ecovadis.com). That is one assessment mechanism among several (CDP, buyer-specific spreadsheets, Manufacture 2030), so it is a conservative floor, not the full picture.

Assumptions (stated, not sourced beyond the base number):

• Assume 40% of EcoVadis-rated companies are SME-sized (under 500 employees, no dedicated sustainability staff): 175,000 x 40% = 70,000 target companies.
• Assume 30% of those face the specific pain this product solves, meaning 2 or more differently formatted requests from different customers in a year (versus a single EcoVadis assessment they can reuse as-is): 70,000 x 30% = 21,000 companies. This is the SAM.
• ACV assumption: $2,400/year (Growth tier at $249/mo, in line with comparable SME compliance SaaS pricing such as CSRDpro's stated tiers).

TAM (EcoVadis-anchored floor, all SME suppliers with any formal ESG ask): 70,000 x $2,400 = $168M SAM (SMEs juggling 2+ different formats a year): 21,000 x $2,400 = $50.4M SOM (3-year target at 3% of SAM): 630 customers x $2,400 = $1.5M ARR

Monetization strategy

Subscription SaaS billed monthly or annually per company profile. The core value is time saved per questionnaire cycle plus the ability to legally decline over-reaching requests, so pricing scales with the number of active customer-questionnaire mappings a supplier is juggling, not seats. A parallel per-client tier serves sustainability consultants and accounting firms who manage the VSME filings for several small manufacturing clients at once, which extends the sales channel beyond direct suppliers.

Pricing strategy

• Starter, $99/mo: one company profile, up to 3 active customer questionnaire mappings, VSME Basic profile builder, manual CSV data entry, export mapped to each customer's format.
• Growth, $249/mo (anchor): up to 15 active mappings, VSME Cap Checker with pushback-email generation, renewal reminders when a customer's annual request comes back around.
• Consultant, $79/mo per managed client company: volume tier for sustainability consultants and bookkeeping/accounting firms handling VSME filings for multiple SME clients.

Entry point is Starter at $99/mo, priced to be worth trying the moment a supplier finishes one painful manual questionnaire by hand. Growth is the anchor because most target suppliers deal with more than 3 formats a year once they have more than a couple of large customers.

Lead magnet

A free VSME Cap Checker: upload any customer's sustainability questionnaire (PDF, Excel, or pasted portal text) and get back, question by question, which items exceed what a company under 1,000 employees is legally required to answer under the EU Omnibus value-chain cap, plus a free one-paragraph pushback email citing the regulation. It solves a real, current problem in under two minutes and captures the lead at the exact moment they are staring at a new questionnaire.

Competitors

• EcoVadis: the dominant supplier-rating platform. Owned and controlled by the large buyer, not the supplier. A good score only reduces friction with customers who accept EcoVadis specifically; it does nothing for the other buyer-specific spreadsheets and CDP requests that arrive the same year.
• CSRDpro: helps an SME assemble its own VSME-aligned annual sustainability report with templates and plain-language guidance. Built around one outward report, not around remapping that data into each individual customer's inbound format.
• Worldly (Higg Index): a supply chain sustainability platform for apparel and footwear. Vertical-specific and, like EcoVadis, a program the supplier joins inside the buyer's ecosystem.
• Manufacture 2030: an automotive supply chain decarbonization platform deployed by large automakers onto their supplier base. Supplier data lives inside the buyer's chosen system, not portable to the supplier's other customers.
• Normative, Sweep, Watershed: enterprise carbon accounting platforms built and priced for large companies doing their own Scope 1 through 3 accounting with a dedicated sustainability team, well beyond what a 20 to 500 person supplier needs or can afford.

What competitors offer now

Every option today is either a buyer-owned assessment the supplier must complete inside that buyer's specific system with zero reuse elsewhere (EcoVadis, Worldly, Manufacture 2030), a report-writing tool aimed at the supplier's own single annual disclosure rather than the recurring stream of inbound customer-specific formats (CSRDpro), or full enterprise carbon accounting software priced for companies with a sustainability department, not a supplier answering its fifth spreadsheet of the year (Normative, Sweep, Watershed). None of them check an incoming request against the legal VSME cap and none of them let a supplier maintain one dataset and export it into whatever shape the next customer demands.

What can be done differently to attract customers

Make the data supplier-owned instead of buyer-owned. The supplier builds one VSME-aligned profile once, and ScopeOnce turns that same dataset into whatever format shows up next, so the second, third, and tenth questionnaire take minutes instead of hours. Layer the VSME Cap Checker on top as the wedge and lead magnet: it is the first tool built around a regulation that took effect this year, it gives suppliers something existing vendors cannot (a documented right to say no), and it turns a purely defensive compliance chore into a tool that visibly saves money and time from the first use.