Two Companies, One Founder:
Rachel Delacour is a French entrepreneur who has built and exited a software company, then started over in a completely different category. Most founders do one or the other. She did both.
Back in 2009, she and her husband launched BIME Analytics because they were dissatisfied with existing analytics tools and decided to build their own. The platform lets companies pull and analyze data across multiple sources in real time. With Delacour as CEO, BIME raised a $4 million Series A in 2013 and was acquired by Zendesk in 2015 for $45 million in cash.
That was a rare outcome at the time. French Tech was still early, cloud adoption was sluggish domestically, and exits for French startups were hard to come by.
From Analytics to Carbon:
After the Zendesk acquisition, Delacour stepped back. Then a conversation with her son on a beach pushed her back in. He asked her about climate change and rising sea levels. The question stayed with her, and it led her to research climate change seriously. What she found led her to co-found Sweep in 2020.
Sweep was cofounded by Rachel Delacour, Yannick Chaze, and Raphael Güller, and is B Corp certified and a member of the World Bank’s Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition.
The focus is on a real operational problem. Scope 3 emissions, which cover a company’s indirect supply chain footprint, cannot be managed with spreadsheets or consultants, and Delacour has pointed to this as exactly where Sweep comes in. Companies need software to track, disclose, and act on that data at scale.
What Sweep has Built:
Sweep has raised a total of $100 million across three funding rounds, with backing from investors including Balderton Capital and Coatue.
In 2025, Sweep opened its first US office in Denver, Colorado, marking its formal expansion into the American market.
The platform earned independent recognition in April 2026. Sweep was named a Leader in the 2026 Verdantix Green Quadrant for Enterprise Carbon Management, following an assessment of 21 software vendors, including IBM and SAP. It was the only European pure-play vendor to receive that designation. Sweep achieved the highest score across all 21 vendors, specifically in value chain emissions management.
If you’re researching enterprise carbon management software, this independent benchmark is one of the more useful ways to evaluate the competitive landscape.
The Angel Investor Side:
Delacour not only operates. She has backed several female-founded startups in both the US and France, and she served as co-president of France Digitale from 2016 to 2018. That organisation represents the French tech ecosystem and advocates for digital policy at a national level.
She also holds a UBS Global Visionary designation and is listed as Voyager #183 at Worldview .space, a space tourism venture she is part of.
Her thought leadership has been featured in The Economist and The Wall Street Journal.
AI With a Constraint:
One aspect of how Delacour runs Sweep is worth noting for founders building in regulated or high-scrutiny categories. Her position on AI is deliberate: Sweep uses it specifically for non-financial data management workflows rather than general-purpose computing to automate manual reporting tasks that currently require thousands of hours of human work.
That is a more restrained and defensible position than most. It also reflects how Sweep operates as a B Corp, where internal credibility on sustainability matters as much as the product promise.
Still Building:
At VivaTech 2025, Delacour was invited to join a live panel with French President Emmanuel Macron alongside other prominent tech founders, where she raised the question of how public procurement decisions could better support decarbonization, citing SNCF as an example of a large company already changing its supply chain practices to reduce emissions.
If you follow Women in Tech founders in European tech, Rachel Delacour is one of the clearer examples of what a second act looks like when it is built on actual conviction rather than trend chasing. Two companies, two different problems, one consistent approach: find the real pain, build the infrastructure, and stay.
