Organisation profile

TerriFlux is a French R&D-performing SME, a worker-owned cooperative spun off from Inria in 2021, incubated by the Inria Startup Studio and labelled Deeptech by Bpifrance, specialising in the accounting of material, energy and monetary flows in value chains and territories — from the method to the software to the operational service.

TerriFlux is a French R&D-performing SME (2021), a worker-owned cooperative spun off from the STEEP team at Inria, dedicated to the accounting of material, energy and monetary flows in value chains and territories. Its AF Filières framework describes a value chain as a supply-use product/sector graph, collects heterogeneous sources with explicit uncertainty bounds, and reconciles them by weighted constrained optimisation; it is complemented by regional downscaling and by data assimilation, which is what turns national accounts into regional monitors that can be updated rather than rebuilt. TerriFlux also publishes OpenSankey (open source) and MFASankey, the visualisation and modelling layer through which stakeholders actually use the results. Biomass value chains are where the company has gone deepest, but the framework is not domain-specific: TerriFlux has delivered municipal waste flow mapping, energy metabolism work under contract with CNRS, and couplings of physical and monetary accounts. The same framework and tools have also been used by its research partner Inria-STEEP to produce nine national accounts for metals, minerals, fossil fuels, water and waste and territorial energy flow diagrams: work TerriFlux did not carry out, which shows that the method travels beyond its authors. The company was incubated by the Inria Startup Studio, is labelled Deeptech by Bpifrance, and became a worker cooperative in 2023.

TerriFlux is a French R&D-performing SME, incorporated in 2021 as a worker-owned cooperative (SCOP) near Grenoble. It was spun out of the STEEP research team of Inria, the French national institute for research in digital science and technology, and continues to work in close partnership with it. Its registered purpose is the study of material, environmental and monetary flows in value chains and territories, and it covers the whole chain from the accounting method to the software to the operational service delivered to a public authority or an agency.

Core expertise. TerriFlux develops and applies the AF Filières method, a supply-use accounting framework in which a value chain is described as a bipartite product/sector graph with hierarchical nomenclatures stored in PSUT format. Heterogeneous and partly contradictory sources — statistics, customs, industry federations, surveys, remote sensing — are collected with explicit uncertainty bounds and reconciled by weighted constrained optimisation, producing a consistent, mass-balanced and fully documented picture of a chain together with its residual uncertainty. The method is complemented by regional downscaling (allocation keys, transport flow matrices, absorbing Markov chains) and by data assimilation procedures that allow an account to be updated as new sources become available rather than rebuilt from scratch.

Scope. Biomass value chains — forest-wood, agriculture, livestock and food — are where the company has gone deepest and holds its longest record. The framework itself is domain-agnostic. TerriFlux has itself delivered municipal waste flow mapping for a local authority, energy metabolism work under contract with CNRS, and couplings of physical and monetary accounts. Beyond its own contracts, the same framework and tools have been used by its research partner Inria-STEEP to build national flow accounts for metals, non-metallic minerals, fossil fuels, blue water and waste, and territorial energy flow diagrams within a multi-year participatory process. Those studies are not TerriFlux deliveries; they are evidence that the method and the software are usable by third parties.

Network. TerriFlux works with the French agencies and technical institutes that hold flow data — ADEME, IGN, FranceAgriMer, ONF, FCBA, INRAE, Inria, CNRS — with the agricultural technical institutes federated in the FILARMONI network, and with regional bioeconomy observatories and local authorities.