Watershed is Rated Exemplary in the 2025 ISG Buyers Guide™ for Sustainability Emerging Providers

Watershed, founded in 2019, provides enterprise software focused on sustainability data management, emissions measurement, sustainability reporting and decarbonization workflows. The company positions its offering as an integrated sustainability platform intended to support organizations in collecting, analyzing and reporting sustainability-related data, with an emphasis on greenhouse gas emissions and regulatory disclosures. The company frames its offering as enabling organizations to measure environmental impact, meet reporting obligations and take actions related to emissions reduction.

Watershed was rated Exemplary in the ISG Buyers Guide™ for Sustainability Emerging Providers published in December 2025. Providers that are Exemplary were found to perform above the median in product and customer experience. The guide is designed to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of business and IT requirements. The findings of this research provide a comprehensive approach to rating software providers and rank their ability to meet specific product and customer experience requirements. Emerging providers are those that do not meet the minimum revenue threshold for inclusion in the main Buyers Guide. These products offer some or most of the capabilities available from larger competitors and may deliver features, functions or user experiences that better suit specific enterprise needs. They may also provide a lower total cost of implementation and ownership.

Watershed’s core product portfolio is organized around a single platform with multiple functional modules rather than a collection of standalone products. A central component is its corporate emissions measurement capability, which supports configuration of calculation methodologies and production of emissions measurement outputs. Watershed publishes explanatory material describing how it approaches carbon accounting, including the methodological framing used in emissions calculations, though detailed technical specifications are not presented in a single consolidated document.

The platform includes a sustainability reporting and disclosures module designed to support the preparation of regulatory and voluntary sustainability reports. This module is positioned around the reuse of measured data across multiple reporting outputs and provides a guided report-building workflow. Watershed also offers a supply chain-focused module that supports supplier engagement and the collection and analysis of supplier-related emissions data, with a stated emphasis on Scope 3 emissions.

A significant component of Watershed’s offering is CEDA, the Comprehensive Environmental Data Archive. CEDA is positioned as a database of emissions factors, particularly oriented toward Scope 3 calculations, and is described in external standards documentation as being based on multi-regional input–output modeling. Watershed also distributes versions of CEDA publicly through open data registries, providing packaged datasets for external use. While the availability of CEDA is well documented, detailed documentation on how CEDA integrates technically with the broader Watershed platform is limited in the publicly surfaced materials.

Watershed offers a Marketplace that can be used to support the procurement of carbon removal credits, clean power, and sustainable aviation fuel certificates. The Marketplace is described as a mechanism for connecting customers with environmental instruments and suppliers, but the underlying transaction mechanics, accounting treatment and integration details with emissions inventories are not fully detailed in the public sources reviewed.

The platform also includes a Product Footprints solution, which is designed to support the calculation of product- or material-level carbon footprints. Watershed describes this capability as using artificial intelligence to decompose products and materials and generate product carbon footprints. Public materials describe the workflow conceptually but do not provide detailed documentation of the underlying data requirements, model transparency or validation processes, which introduces some uncertainty about how results are produced in practice.

Watershed positions its broader platform as incorporating “Sustainability AI,” describing AI-assisted workflows that automate or accelerate data classification, emissions estimation and footprint generation. These descriptions are primarily presented at a conceptual level. Specific details about model governance, explainability or customer control over AI-driven assumptions are not clearly documented in the publicly available materials and should be considered inferred rather than confirmed capabilities.

For regulatory reporting, Watershed offers a CSRD-focused solution that is positioned to support European sustainability reporting requirements. Public descriptions indicate support for structured CSRD workflows, including the ability to export reports to Word and apply XBRL tagging. While these functional claims are explicitly stated, detailed documentation on compliance coverage, update cadence in response to regulatory changes and audit support features is not publicly consolidated.

Within the competitive landscape, Watershed operates in the enterprise sustainability and carbon management software category. This category includes large enterprise software providers offering sustainability-focused platforms, as well as specialized vendors dedicated primarily to carbon accounting and sustainability reporting. Competitors in this category include enterprise sustainability platforms from major cloud and ERP vendors, as well as independent carbon management and reporting specialists.