Verdantix Smart Innovators 2025: What LCA Software Buyers Should Know, And How XYCLE Aligns With Emerging Needs

Life cycle assessment (LCA) software is becoming essential to organisations navigating increasingly stringent sustainability expectations and regulatory frameworks. As companies face rising demands for transparent data, auditable impact reporting and supplier-level evidence, the tools they select influence not only compliance but also product development, procurement strategy and supply chain engagement. Verdantix recently highlighted these pressures in their analysis of how LCA software supports modern sustainability strategies. Their Smart Innovators: LCA Software 2025 report offers an independent evaluation of the technologies shaping this rapidly evolving landscape, assessing vendors across capability areas that reflect the challenges and opportunities facing sustainability, engineering and procurement teams.

Minviro is included in this year’s report. While Verdantix does not endorse or rank platforms, its analysis clarifies the core requirements of modern LCA software. Against this backdrop, XYCLE represents Minviro’s response to the growing need for accurate modelling, high-quality primary data, transparent methodologies and collaborative decision-making. Built on over a decade of scientific life cycle assessment expertise, XYCLE has rapidly established itself as a platform that supports organisations in moving from ad hoc modelling to scalable, repeatable, and operationally integrated LCA approaches.

“Verdantix recognising XYCLE in its first year shows that innovation and trust can go hand in hand. We’re building a platform that moves fast, integrates deeply, and gives enterprise teams the confidence they need for regulatory, commercial, and sustainability decisions.” Founder & CEO, Robert Pell

What Verdantix Evaluates in LCA Software

Verdantix structures its assessment around three capability areas that mirror how organisations increasingly approach lifecycle assessment: data collection and management, modelling and impact calculation, and performance analysis, including scenario exploration. These categories reflect a broader shift in the market from retrospective reporting toward dynamic, multi-stakeholder processes in which LCA outputs inform design choices, supplier engagement and regulatory readiness.

Across all three areas, Verdantix highlights the need for software that can integrate diverse data sources, represent complex systems accurately and transparently, and support the evaluation of alternatives under different design or supply chain conditions. As the LCA software market matures, these capabilities are no longer optional; they underpin the credibility and scalability of sustainability programmes within organisations of all sizes.

How XYCLE Aligns With the Needs Identified by Verdantix

XYCLE is built for real-world supply chains, combining expert-grade modelling, real-time supplier collaboration, and audit-ready data aligned with global standards.

XYCLE was purpose-built to address the challenges outlined in the Verdantix evaluation by combining scientific rigour with the operational requirements of modern sustainability and product teams. Minviro’s deep expertise in applied life cycle assessment is embedded directly in the platform’s architecture, resulting in a system that emphasises methodological correctness, traceability, and consistent modelling, rather than automated shortcuts or superficial simplifications. This foundation enables users to build models that accurately reflect real production systems and supply chains, supporting decisions that withstand both internal scrutiny and external verification.

A core requirement highlighted by Verdantix is the ability to obtain and manage high-quality primary data from suppliers. XYCLE enables organisations to ingest bill of materials data, process-level inputs and product carbon footprint information at scale, whether sourced from ERP systems, supplier portals or structured data templates. These inputs flow into controlled workflows that maintain traceability and data integrity throughout the assessment process. This aligns directly with Verdantix’s emphasis on supplier engagement as a critical driver of accurate lifecycle assessment, particularly in regulatory contexts where evidence and data provenance are essential.

In modelling, XYCLE provides a transparent, scientifically grounded environment for defining system boundaries, functional units, and process flows. Rather than relying on opaque automation, the platform provides clarity into how models are constructed and updated, enabling organisations to standardise their approach across product portfolios. XYCLE supports globally recognised methodologies, including ISO 14040/44, ISO 14067, PEF 3.1, and AWARE, alongside EF Data Quality scoring to assess the robustness of the underlying data. This standards alignment ensures that results produced in XYCLE are both comparable and audit-ready, supporting communication with stakeholders ranging from internal engineers to regulatory bodies.

Verdantix also highlights scenario analysis as a key capability for organisations integrating sustainability into procurement and product strategy. XYCLE enables teams to explore alternatives across materials, suppliers and processes in a structured way, providing visibility into how design or sourcing decisions influence environmental performance. This capability helps shift lifecycle assessment from a retrospective exercise to a proactive tool for strategic planning and ecodesign.

Collaboration is another essential theme for Verdantix, and an area where XYCLE brings a modern, infrastructure-led approach. The platform supports real-time collaboration, allowing contributors, reviewers, and technical specialists to work together without versioning issues or manual consolidation. Data provenance is captured through the platform’s transparent Data Navigator, enabling teams to understand the assumptions, datasets and process flows behind every result. This collaborative foundation reduces friction between sustainability specialists, engineers, procurement teams and suppliers, enabling faster alignment and more confident decision-making.

Together, these capabilities position XYCLE as a platform that not only reflects the needs identified in the Verdantix analysis but also advances them, prioritising accuracy, transparency, model confidence, and organisational scalability to support both regulatory demands and operational decision-making.

Regulatory Drivers Expect More From LCA Software

Verdantix highlights the expanding regulatory landscape, including ESPR, PPWR, CSRD, EUDR and CBAM, which together require companies to demonstrate methodological consistency, supply chain transparency, robust primary data and regular updates to product-level assessments. These developments are reshaping expectations for LCA software, pushing platforms to support continuous rather than periodic analysis and to integrate with broader data ecosystems.

XYCLE is structured to respond to this shift. Its ability to ingest data from multiple sources, its transparent modelling architecture, and its standards-aligned impact assessment methods help organisations prepare for regulatory requirements and ensure that insights generated from lifecycle assessment can be reused across compliance, design, and strategic workflows.

Why Organisations Choose XYCLE

Organisations adopting XYCLE often emphasise three characteristics that distinguish the platform in practice: the scientific depth underpinning its modelling capabilities, the operational ease with which teams can collaborate on assessments and the emphasis on accuracy through structured supplier engagement. XYCLE bridges the traditional divide between expert-only modelling tools and enterprise-ready sustainability platforms by combining precise methodology with an architecture designed for scale, governance and clarity.

By connecting data, teams and insights, XYCLE helps organisations move beyond one-off LCA studies towards continuous, integrated sustainability intelligence. This approach enables procurement teams to assess supplier alternatives with greater confidence, supports design teams in exploring material substitutions or improved circularity, and provides sustainability specialists with a platform that preserves scientific integrity while improving accessibility across the organisation.

Increasing Clarity

Verdantix’s Smart Innovators: LCA Software 2025 report provides valuable clarity on the capabilities required for organisations to build robust, scalable lifecycle assessment programmes. Minviro’s inclusion reflects the alignment between XYCLE’s design principles and these evolving needs. As sustainability regulations accelerate and organisations seek accurate, traceable, and actionable insights, XYCLE offers a platform grounded in scientific rigour and built for collaborative, operationally relevant lifecycle assessment.

Organisations evaluating LCA tools increasingly prioritise usability, supplier engagement, modelling transparency and decision support. XYCLE brings these elements together in a platform designed not just to calculate impacts but also to help teams communicate clearly and make confident decisions.

Download the report from Verdantix here.

About Verdantix

Verdantix is an independent research and advisory firm that serves a global client base consisting of the world’s most innovative corporations, technology and services vendors, and investors. Our insights and analysis form a foundation of the most granular data available in the marketplaces we serve. This allows us to make highly accurate far-reaching forecasts and big-picture predictions that business leaders depend on when they are setting out to reach their most important goals.

Citation:Source: Verdantix, Smart Innovators: LCA Software (2025), November 2025