Helsinki-based The Upright Project, a company building an AI-enabled quantification model to measure the net impact of companies and funds, announced on Tuesday that it has raised €5M in a Seed round of funding.
One issue has remained crucial in the ongoing climate crisis: how do businesses affect the planet we live on? According to ESG reporting, the common method focuses on the company’s financial risks associated with environmental or social issues. The Upright Project measures the positive and negative of a company’s impact on the environment, health, society, and knowledge in order to provide new analytical rigour and comparability to impact evaluations of businesses.
Upright’s founder and CEO, Annu Nieminen, says, “The global ESG and impact discourse is in dire need of common sense and understanding of what is bit and what is not. Currently, the largest impacts of a company’s core business are buried under masses of details on ways of working and reporting. We need a transparent impact data platform with comparable data that is accessible for all.”
“World’s first open-access impact data platform”
Founded in 2017 by Annu Nieminen and Juho Ojala, Upright’s AI-based impact data engine contextualises the disclosures and sustainability targets of companies with estimates of the EU taxonomy alignment, UN Sustainable Development Goals, and Upright’s proprietary net impact quantifications.
The data is taken from the world’s largest open-access scientific database (200m+ scientific articles), firm disclosures, market research studies, Eurostat, OECD and other databases.
Although there are many organisations that offer carbon accounting or ESG reporting, Upright claims it is the first open-access platform to evaluate businesses across industries based on both their financial performance and total net effect. The model’s methodology increases the depth of the majority of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) assessments, and includes measures like ESG, SFDR, and others, which are currently skewed by firms’ self-reporting and purchasing power.
Upright’s new impact model
According to a statement from Upright, businesses are the primary source of emissions as just 100 corporations have produced more than 70 per cent of the world’s GHG emissions since 1988. Upright claims its new impact model will have wide-ranging effects. Their first product release from earlier this year already featured publicly accessible data for the 500 top firms worldwide.
Upright’s business strategy is built on providing decision-makers with a comprehensive end-to-end approach by selling subscriptions for more in-depth outcomes by tracking progress, establishing goals, and sharing results.
Upright’s model has been used to quantify the net impact of more than 23,000 companies, and their customers include more than 180 organisations. Some of them include investors such as the financial services corporation Nasdaq, leading PE/VC investors such as Permira and EQT, and large asset managers such as Invesco and Nordea.
Investors in this round
The round was led by German-based green-tech VC firm Planet A Ventures. The German VC firm works with green tech startups in Europe that are improving the environment while establishing internationally scalable businesses. Planet A encourages innovation in four crucial areas including climate mitigation, waste reduction, resource savings and biodiversity protection.
Nick de la Forge, co-founder and Partner at Planet A, says, “With 42 per cent of companies exaggerating their sustainability claims, we need a new impact course. Enabling powerful stakeholders, from boards and investors to talent and consumers, to understand the net impact of companies and make informed decisions will lead to a step-change in companies’ actions and their effect on our planet. Upright’s technology isn’t just “nice to have” but will become business critical.”
The round also saw participation from First Fellow Partners, a fund founded by renowned investor Risto Siilasmaa, ex-Chair of Nokia and Founder of F-Secure and WithSecure.
Siilasmaa says, “Upright’s goal is in their name: make impact assessments more honest and reputable. They are solving one of the most complex challenges businesses face by removing the blind spots in our current assessment of impact, while also democratising it. When they asked me to invest I did not need to think twice.”
