This startup wants to show the impact Fortune 500 companies have on the environment and society. Check out the 18-slide pitch deck Upright used to raise $5.2 million.
Summary
The engineer-turned-McKinsey consultant ended up in Silicon Valley interviewing investors, academics, and founders on how they measure impact.She couldnt find anyone working on a tool to show the overall negative or positive impact of businesses so decided to do it herself "as the cliche goes," she told Insider.Nieminen has been quietly building her company, Upright, since 2017. The Helsinki-based startup has been bootstrapped until now, as it announces a 5 million euros seed round (around $5.2 million).ESG reporting is currently a box-ticking exercise and focuses on financial risk, while carbon accounting tracks incremental change without oversight as to whether the business is an overall net positive or negative, Nieminen said.Upright draws on scientific databases, company disclosures, and a range of other market and government data sources to establish a top-down assessment of a businesss impact on the environment, health, society, and knowledge. It also benchmarks businesses against regulations such as the EU taxonomy and UN Sustainable Development Goals.It works by stimulating the global private sector, and all of its products and services, the cofounder and CEO said. Its client list already includes Nasdaq, private equity and venture capital firms Permira and EQT, and asset managers Invesco and Nordea.There is also an open-access version of the SaaS platform; data is currently available for Fortune 500 companies. Nieminen, who believes such data should be publicly available for transparency, hopes everyone from job candidates and consumers will use it to help them make career and purchasing decisions.German firm Planet A Ventures led the round alongside First Fellow Partners, an early-stage fund founded by entrepreneur Risto Siilasmaa, who is also the former chair of Nokia.
Funding
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