Arpit Gupta

Arpit Gupta is an entrepreneur and the co-founder of Sustaineve, a carbon accounting platform built to help manufacturers measure and report greenhouse gas emissions with compliance-grade accuracy. An analyst by training, he has spent years working inside the operational and financial data of real companies — examining how businesses function at the level where numbers, processes, and decisions meet.

Arpit Gupta spent years as a Business Analyst — the kind of work that puts you inside the numbers of real companies, real operations, real problems. It was in that seat that he first noticed something that should not have been true: manufacturing companies generating thousands of tonnes of emissions every year had no reliable, structured way to measure them. Not even a reasonably accurate estimate.

The data existed — fuel invoices, electricity bills, process records — but it sat in silos, unstructured and untranslated. Nobody had built the system to turn it into something an auditor, a regulator, or a buyer could accept.

A less analytical person might have flagged it as someone else's problem. Arpit Gupta mapped it.

The more he looked, the clearer the gap became: the emissions measurement tools that existed were built for Fortune 500 boardrooms and Western regulatory frameworks. Indian manufacturers were being asked to meet compliance standards that nobody had given them the infrastructure to meet. The consultants filling the gap handed over spreadsheets that were outdated before the ink dried.

"I kept asking a simple question," he says. "Why can a factory owner see their profit and loss in real time, but have zero visibility into their emissions? Financial accounting took decades to become standardised. Carbon accounting doesn't have that luxury — the climate won't wait."

That question became Sustaineve — a compliance-grade Scope 1 and Scope 2 GHG accounting platform built specifically for how Indian manufacturers actually operate. Not a localised version of a Western product, but a purpose-built system aligned with GHG Protocol methodologies, IPCC emission factors, and India's BRSR reporting requirements from day one.

"Manufacturers are not the villains of the climate story," Arpit Gupta says. "They are the ones who actually make things — and they want to measure and reduce. The problem was never intention. The problem was that nobody gave them a system that met the compliance bar regulators and global buyers are now demanding."

The timing of his move is not accidental. India's regulatory landscape is shifting faster than most people realise. SEBI's BRSR mandate is pushing listed companies toward mandatory sustainability disclosures. At the same time, the European Union's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) is placing carbon costs on imports — directly affecting Indian exporters. What was voluntary only a few years ago is rapidly becoming a prerequisite for doing business.

Gupta positioned Sustaineve ahead of this shift, not in reaction to it.

His thesis is straightforward: carbon accounting will become as non-negotiable as financial accounting for manufacturers. The companies that measure early will not only satisfy regulators — they will compete differently. Lower verified emissions translate to lower operating costs, better procurement terms from global buyers, and access to export markets that are increasingly closing their doors to unaudited supply chains.

Starting with India — where regulatory complexity is among the hardest to solve for — means the platform can work almost anywhere else by default.

"Every factory in India will need to measure its emissions within the next decade," Arpit Gupta says. "The question is not if. The question is whether they'll do it with spreadsheets and consultants, or with real infrastructure."

"We are building the infrastructure."