Why we're so excited about Marina Traversari joining Vizibli — and what it means for SMEs facing the sustainability challenge

We are delighted to announce that Marina Traversari has joined Vizibli as Chair of the Board — and we believe this is a significant moment in our company's story.

Marina brings considerable experience of building and exiting a successful climate tech company and will help Vizibli accelerate our vision of transforming sustainability from a highly manual reporting burden into commercial advantage for SMEs in the supply chain and their advisors.

Marina was COO of Spherics, a carbon accounting platform for SMEs, through to its acquisition by Sage, one of the UK's most respected FTSE 100 companies and the leading provider of accounting software to small businesses.

Before that, she chaired GapSquare, a data equity venture that was acquired by LexisNexis, and has worked with organisations including Meta and Oracle. Marina understands at first hand what it takes to build a sustainability-focused business from early traction to a successful exit.

That experience matters enormously right now — because the problem Vizibli is solving has never been more urgent.

The pressure on SMEs is real — and it's building fast

For most small and medium-sized businesses, sustainability has moved from a vague aspiration to a concrete operational requirement. The pressure is coming from every direction at once.

Customers are asking for emissions data before signing contracts. Investors want to see credible reduction plans. Employees, especially younger talent, expect their employer to take this seriously. Lenders are beginning to factor sustainability performance into credit decisions. And legislators are catching up fast, with new reporting requirements extending steadily further down the supply chain.

The result is that SMEs are being asked to do something that even large corporations have struggled with: measure their carbon footprint accurately, report it compliantly, and show a credible plan to reduce it — all while running a business with a fraction of the resources.

For most, this has felt impossible. For many SMEs, inhouse reporting can be a time consuming admin burden, traditional carbon accounting tools the tools are often too complex and costly and an annual audit by consultants can be cost-prohibitive.

The existing options aren't built for SMEs

Traditional carbon accounting software was designed for large organisations with dedicated sustainability teams, significant budgets, and the time to invest in complex implementations. For an SME, these tools are often expensive, technically demanding, and require specialist knowledge that most businesses simply don't have in-house.

Sustainability consultants can help — but good ones are expensive. Engaging a consultant to build a carbon baseline, design a reduction strategy, and produce compliant reports is out of reach for most small businesses, particularly those being asked to do this work not because they sought it out, but because a large customer or a regulator now requires it.

The gap between what SMEs are being asked to do and what they can realistically afford to do has been widening for years. Many businesses have been left either ignoring the issue — which carries growing commercial and regulatory risk — or producing rough, unreliable estimates that satisfy no one.

This is the gap Vizibli was built to close.

An AI-first approach that turns data you already have into action you can take

Vizibli's platform starts from a simple insight: most of the data needed to understand a business's carbon footprint already exists in the operational systems the business uses every day. Invoices, utility bills, procurement records, logistics data — it's all there.

The problem has never been a lack of data. It's been the absence of a tool that can make sense of it quickly, accurately, and in a way that's useful to a business owner rather than a sustainability specialist.

Vizibli's AI-first approach does exactly that. It connects to operational data, identifies emissions in real time, flags cost-saving and carbon-reduction opportunities simultaneously, and generates compliant reports — without requiring the business to hire new staff or engage expensive external consultants.

1. Real-time insight

Identify cost and carbon savings as they emerge, not once a year.

2. Compliant reporting

Meet legislative and customer requirements without the manual effort.

3. Supply chain collaboration

Work with suppliers and stakeholders to reduce emissions across the whole value chain.

That last point matters more than it might first appear. Scope 3 emissions — the emissions that come from a company's supply chain and customers — typically account for the large majority of a business's total carbon footprint.

No company can meaningfully reduce its emissions without engaging the businesses around it. Vizibli makes that collaboration practical, connecting advisors, suppliers and customers in a shared view of progress.

Sustainability as commercial advantage — not just compliance

One of the most important shifts in how Vizibli thinks about this problem is the framing.

Sustainability has too often been presented to SMEs as a cost — a regulatory burden to be managed, a box to be ticked, a drain on time and money that produces no direct return.

That framing is wrong — and it's one of the reasons uptake has been so slow. In practice, the actions that reduce emissions most reliably are almost always the same actions that reduce costs: using less energy, generating less waste, optimising procurement, improving logistics efficiency.

Carbon reduction and margin protection are not in conflict. They point in the same direction.

Vizibli is built on that insight. Its platform doesn't ask businesses to choose between doing the right thing and running a profitable operation. It shows them how those two things are the same thing.

For the accountants, consultants and advisors who work with SMEs, Vizibli offers something equally valuable: the ability to deliver more impact to more clients, faster, with a platform that does the heavy lifting — and generates the kind of recurring, data-driven relationship that builds lasting revenue.

Why Marina's appointment matters

Marina has seen this market from the inside. At Spherics, she built a product that made carbon accounting accessible to small businesses at a time when that was genuinely hard — and she grew it to a point where one of the UK's largest software companies saw it as a strategic asset worth acquiring.

She knows what good looks like in this space, and she knows what it takes to build the trust of SMEs who are sceptical about yet another sustainability platform.

Her experience at the intersection of SME software, sustainability, and commercial growth is directly relevant to where Vizibli is heading. Her network, her knowledge of the market, and her understanding of what SMEs actually need — rather than what the sustainability industry sometimes assumes they need — will accelerate everything we're building.

"With Marina on board, we can accelerate our vision of transforming sustainability from a highly manual reporting burden into genuine commercial advantage for SMEs and the advisors who support them." James Samuels, Co-founder, Vizibli

What comes next

The regulatory tide is not turning back. The demands from customers, investors, lenders and employees are not going away. For SMEs, the question is no longer whether to engage with sustainability reporting — it's how to do it without it consuming the business.

Vizibli is the answer to that question. And with Marina helping to guide the next phase of our growth, we're in a stronger position than ever to deliver it at scale.

If you're an SME trying to make sense of your obligations, an advisor looking for a better way to support your clients, or a business in the supply chain facing increasing pressure from customers up the chain — we'd love to talk.