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- Q Insights #019
Q Insights #019
The sustainability solutions acquisition wave is continuing into 2026
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This week’s read time: 5 minutes
Welcome to this edition of Q Insights — our bi-weekly newsletter for sustainability and ESG professionals looking to make smarter solution decisions.
Each edition brings you concise, relevant updates on the tools, trends, and technologies driving the sustainable transition. We filter the noise, highlight what matters, and help you navigate the sustainability solution landscape with clarity and confidence.
In this edition, we’ll cover:
• Q Intelligence: The sustainability solutions acquisition wave is continuing into 2026 📊
• Q Interview: From CSRD ‘gold rush’ to long-term sustainability systems (An interview with Maria Tymtsias, Co-Founder & Head of Sustainability and Community at Palau 💬
• Q Signals: SLR acquired WAP Sustainability, beSirius launched a CDP scoring analysis tool, and other news 🗞️
• KanataQ Corner: Newly Listed Providers on KanataQ ✅
• and other insights 💡
Q INTELLIGENCE
📊 The sustainability solutions acquisition wave is continuing into 2026
The year opened with three notable acquisitions: Diginex acquired The Remedy Project, followed shortly by the confirmation of the acquisition of Plan A for €55 million. Most recently, SLR Consulting announced the acquisition of WAP Sustainability.
On the surface, these are different types of deals. In practice, they reflect the same strategic direction. Across sustainability reporting, carbon management, supply chain due diligence, and ESG data platforms, acquisitions are increasingly used to close structural gaps rather than add incremental features. Vendors are assembling broader, more defensible platforms as buyer expectations converge across reporting, carbon, and operational accountability.
A few consistent signals stand out across recent deals:
• Platforms acquiring domain depth in carbon, supply chain, or regulatory interpretation
• A clear move toward integrated workflows rather than point solutions
• Increased emphasis on auditability, traceability, and implementation readiness
• Software being paired more tightly with advisory, remediation, or assurance capabilities
This is not a short-term reaction to any single regulation or market shock. It reflects a deeper shift in how buyers evaluate sustainability solutions and how vendors position for longer sales cycles and higher scrutiny.
The early-year activity is a strong signal that consolidation will remain a defining theme in 2026, particularly for platforms aiming to serve enterprise buyers with complex, cross-functional requirements.
At KanataQ, we’ll continue to track how these deals reshape platform strategies, category boundaries, and buyer expectations across the sustainability solutions landscape.
Q INTERVIEW
This week’s guest:
Maria Tymtsias
Co-Founder & Head of Sustainability and Community at Palau
1. Can you tell us what Palau does and how it helps companies?
Palau is built as a continuity engine for sustainability and other non-financial work. At the core of the platform is a single repository where all documents, data, and past answers live.
On top of that repository, teams can build any custom workflow they need, whether it’s reporting, assessments, supplier engagement, or work related to different frameworks. The key idea is that nothing is one-off.
Whatever comes in — a new request, a new framework, a new questionnaire - teams reuse what already exists. AI helps with matching, autopopulation, and exploring the repository through chat, so work doesn’t restart from scratch each year.
The platform is meant to be used continuously, not just at reporting time.
2. You invested heavily in building a community early on. Why was community critical to your product and growth, and how does it concretely influence product decisions today?
Community started from a very practical need. At the beginning of CSRD, there were many open questions and no safe place to brainstorm, challenge interpretations, or learn from others. We created that space first for ourselves, and it quickly grew into something much bigger.
Over time, the community became one of our biggest advantages. It’s a closed, trust-based environment where people openly share real problems, drafts, and uncertainties.
Today, the community directly shapes the product. We test new ideas there, explore new directions, and get unfiltered feedback from practitioners. What we learn goes straight back into the platform, which keeps Palau grounded in real work, not assumptions.
3. How are you integrating AI today, and what does “AI-enabled” actually mean in practice for your platform and users?
For us, AI works mostly in the background. Its main role is to help teams reuse what they already have, across frameworks and use cases. It matches new requests to existing documents and past answers, supports autopopulation, and lets users explore large document repositories through chat instead of manual search.
Beyond reuse, AI supports the actual work. It helps identify relevant evidence, highlights gaps, supports benchmarking, and compares inputs against different requirements.
The key point is that we don’t hard-code one use case. We provide a flexible technology layer. With the same building blocks, teams can run very different workflows — from generating IROs, to resilience checks, to answering CDP or EcoVadis, or validating alignment with standards like ISO.
“AI-enabled” for us means giving teams leverage, not prescribing how they should work.
4. You’ve said that in 2025 Palau lost some clients but gained more thoughtful ones. What drove that shift, and how did it change the way you think about your ideal customer and product direction?
The shift wasn’t a surprise. In 2024, the market was dominated by compliance. CSRD created a “gold” rush, companies needed something fast, consultants scaled quickly, and demand exploded. Many teams were focused on compliance purely.
In 2025, reality set in. Compliance alone doesn’t do the work. The companies that stayed and the new ones that joined were more deliberate. They weren’t looking for a one-off CSRD tool, but for a system to support ongoing work.
That changed how we think about our ideal customer. Today, many of our strongest users aren’t even in CSRD scope. They work voluntarily, driven by their own strategy, but face the same complexity, data challenges, and need for automation.
This pushed Palau away from compliance-first thinking and toward building a platform for long-term, continuous work.
Q SIGNALS
Latest developments, insights, and trends
📊 New tools, features, acquisitions, and funding rounds from solution providers
SLR acquired WAP Sustainability (KanataQ listed) to expand its sustainability consulting, software, and ESG data capabilities, strengthening its position in high-growth markets. The deal adds deep expertise in life cycle assessment, environmental product declarations, carbon accounting, and ESG advisory across sectors such as building products, packaging, textiles, electronics, and consumer goods, enabling SLR to tackle larger, more complex global sustainability projects. (link)
beSirius (KanataQ listed) launched a CDP scoring analysis tool that assesses existing CDP responses against the official CDP scoring methodology. It reviews submitted disclosures to show how responses map to CDP scoring tiers, where scoring points are gained or missed, where requirements are incomplete, and which questions block score progression. The analysis also provides question-level guidance on what affects scoring and where improvements can be made. (link)
refinq (KanataQ listed) and Prewave announced a strategic partnership to support companies facing growing CSRD, ESRS, and TNFD requirements by connecting supply chain risk intelligence with location-specific climate and nature insights. The partnership combines Prewave’s AI-powered monitoring of environmental and social risks across multi-tier global supply chains with refinq’s asset-level geospatial analysis of physical climate, biodiversity, and extreme weather risks, including scenario-based insights. Together, they aim to help organizations better identify exposed sites, prioritize mitigation efforts, and build more resilient supply chains. (link)
Schneider Electric launched Resource Advisor+, an AI-powered platform that unifies emissions, energy management, supply chain decarbonization, and sustainability data into a single system. The platform debuts with Carbon Performance for auditable Scope 1–3 emissions management and Supply Chain tools to engage suppliers, with additional modules for climate risk, reporting, and energy efficiency planned later this year. (link)
gryn and Lune merged to create an end-to-end logistics emissions platform combining shipment-level data collection, automated CO2 calculations, insights, and decarbonization tools. The combined company serves 100+ customers across millions of shipments, aims to replace fragmented, manual Scope 3 reporting with automated CO2 intelligence, and will operate under the Lune brand, with Lune’s CEO continuing to lead. (link)
ERM and Auquan announced a partnership to deploy agentic AI across sustainability workflows for financial institutions, aiming to speed up and scale ESG and reputational risk analysis. ERM will use Auquan’s Sustainability Agent to scan global media, regulatory filings and stakeholder reports, helping investors meet stricter requirements such as SFDR Article 8 and strengthen sustainability due diligence across transactions. (link)
KANATAQ CORNER
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