Meet the Team: Q&A with Ty Colman

Following Green Project's acquisition of Optera, we sat down with Ty Colman, Optera's former CRO and Green Project's new Head of Strategic Accounts, to talk about how the deal came together, what customers can expect going forward, and where he believes the industry is going.

Q: How did Optera and the Green Project team approach discussions about the acquisition? What was the goal of combining forces?

A: Optera spent roughly two decades working with Fortune 500 companies to streamline GHG management and unlock the value sitting inside their sustainability data. We got good at the hardest part of it, which is Scope 3 and the data discipline that makes an inventory both defensible and actionable. And the action element was what initially spurred our connection to Green Project.

Our relationship with Green Project started commercially, around renewable energy transactions for our customers. That gave both sides a real working view of the other, so when the strategic conversations began they were not abstract. We already knew what their team was good at, and they knew what ours was good at.

The goal of combining forces was to build a best-in-class, end-to-end sustainability management platform. One that supports the development of an accurate and actionable inventory, and then everything that has to come after it: transition planning, identifying the projects and activities that decarbonize and drive real business value, and in many cases the procurement of renewable energy, all delivered seamlessly through a single platform.

That was the excitement and the promise of the acquisition. A market leading sustainability platform paired with an implementation model that we believe is uniquely designed to serve enterprise customers across the globe.

Q: The acquisition was announced on July 13th, 2026. How has it been going since then?

A: Better than expected, truly.

My first concern, and my first priority, was our customers. When a platform you depend on gets acquired, the reasonable reaction is to wonder whether your roadmap items just got deprioritized. One of the most encouraging things about this deal is that our priorities were already very well aligned, so the progress we have been able to make against a shared roadmap has been strong, and it has been squarely in the interest of our customers and the customer success teams supporting them.

Internally, the go-to-market teams came together very quickly. There is certainly still work in defining how we operate as one company and in settling shared practices. But the direction has been clear from day one, and I have been struck by how little friction there has been and how much everyone is genuinely rowing in the same direction, on top of an incredible foundation.

Q: What's your view on how Optera's capabilities fit into Green Project's platform? Where do you see the clearest synergy?

A: Optera's core value is being the GHG system of record. Getting Scope 1, 2 and 3 right at enterprise scale, with the data lineage and controls that hold up when an auditor walks in. That last part matters more than it used to. A growing share of our work is verification and assurance readiness, and you cannot bolt that on after the fact.

That foundation is what enterprises need to meet the market as it actually exists today: regulatory disclosure, customer disclosure, and the complete, defensible accounting that both require.

Green Project's core value is the “…what you do next.” Renewable energy procurement, supplier engagement, and decarbonization planning across the tiers of a value chain.

The clearest synergy is that those two things are really one workflow, and this market has been selling them as two products. A hotspot analysis is only as good as the inventory underneath it. A supplier campaign only works if you know which suppliers matter and why. Bringing the foundation and the action layer onto one platform means customers stop paying an integration tax just to get to a decision.

Q: For customers who are watching this expansion closely, what would you want them to know about how this changes what Green Project can do for them?

A: Three things. First, continuity. The teams our customers have been working with are the same teams they will keep working with. In any acquisition that is the first question a customer asks: who am I being handed off to, and what changes for me?

Green Project saw the value in our entire team and in our implementation model, which is closely aligned with their own, and that is how we are delivering. Our customers have been genuinely appreciative of that.

Second, depth. The depth of analysis and the depth of supply chain data we can bring together now is at a completely different level. That means we can go much further into supplier level insight, and we can support operational and supply chain decarbonization that we were only scratching the surface of before.

Third, flexibility in how you engage us. We can still deliver a specific module or point solution for a specific problem, with deep supplier engagement being a good example. We can also consolidate a fragmented technology stack and cover the entirety of a sustainability program's needs, from comprehensive greenhouse gas accounting to disclosure and regulatory support to supplier engagement and renewable energy procurement.

Q: Why did it make sense for you to step into your new role at this stage of Green Project’s growth?

A: My job has been the same for a long time regardless of the title on it: stay close to customers, understand what they are actually trying to accomplish, and make sure the product and the commercial approach reflect that. In practice that means helping clients land on the right combination of software and services so they can transform their sustainability programs without losing their minds in data management or absorbing outsized costs.

What changes at this stage is the surface area. Optera's customer base was concentrated in large North American enterprises. Green Project and ACT reach a far broader set of companies, across regions and across the maturity curve, including thousands of suppliers who are being asked for emissions data for the first time.

The reason it made sense now is that the foundations are already built. The engineering, the methodology work, the customer relationships, those exist. What this stage needs is someone connecting them, keeping strategic accounts close through the integration, and making sure that as we scale we do not lose the consultative approach that got us here.

Q: What’s on your mind now, about a month after the acquisition was announced?

A: Momentum, and how we help our customers create it.

A lot of the sustainability practitioners and teams we work with feel stuck in the mud right now. They are being asked to do more with less, the political environment has made the work harder to defend internally, and 2030 targets that used to feel distant are now inside the planning horizon. The headwinds are real, and the result is that momentum is genuinely hard to come by.

So the question I keep coming back to is what we can do to put wins on the board for them. That might be momentum against a regulatory deadline. It might be momentum on supplier engagement, getting suppliers to actually respond and contribute real data. It might be momentum on data quality, so that an audit becomes a streamlined process instead of a painful one.

That is what I am focused on supporting, both for our team and for our clients. What are the things we can do, through the data we bring together and the platform and tools around it, that produce a win and let them build from there.

Q: What do you foresee as the next chapter in Green Project's growth and evolution?

A: I think the industry is moving out of a reporting era and into a reduction era, and most of the tooling in this market was built for the first one.

For years the deliverable was a number and a report. What customers want now is a decision: where to spend, which suppliers to engage, which interventions actually move the curve, and how to defend all of it when someone checks the work. That requires the measurement foundation and the action tooling to be the same system, which is precisely what we are building.

The other shift is how far down the supply chain this is now reaching. The pressure on large companies keeps cascading to their suppliers, and tens of thousands of those companies are being pushed to do this work, whether by customer requirements or by regulation, often with limited knowledge, budget and expertise. Serving them means building something scalable, simple and effective, and it is one of the highest leverage opportunities in this market. Between Green Project, the acquisitions it has made and ACT's reach, we are in a rare position to do it.

If we get the next few years right, we are the place a company goes for the whole arc, from first inventory through credible reduction. That is the excitement, and that is the promise of what this acquisition brings.

Read more about Green Project’s acquisition of Optera.

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