What kind of companies are we building today?
At Slush, we are proud to say that we compensate the flights of all our attendees and serve vegetarian food at the event.
Still, as important as focused sustainability efforts are, we believe that the true impact of our work lies elsewhere: in distributing knowledge that helps founders build generational companies, in creating connections that transcend a single event, and in inspiring the future generation of entrepreneurs to solve the most pressing challenges out there.
Since our mission at Slush is to help founders change the world, we want to understand even better the true impact of the companies we spotlight on our stages.
So, we asked ourselves: are the companies built today changing the world for the better or for the worse?
And in line with our desire to think about impact beyond the traditional sustainability metrics, we framed the question in the following manner: what kind of an impact do these companies have on the world?
Are the companies built today changing the world
for the better or for the worse?
To help us with this, we decided to partner with The Upright Project—a Helsinki-based impact data company using NLP-enabled technologies to draw together humanity’s best knowledge, and scientific research, to quantify the positive and negative impacts that companies have on the environment, health, society, and knowledge.
We have chosen 6 companies that will be featured on our stages to serve as case studies for Upright’s impact analysis, offering us an insight into the direction in which the startup ecosystem is heading.
But before going there, there’s a further question we want to address: why does any of this matter?
The European Ecosystem Cares About Impact—let’s talk about it.
Currently, traditional sustainability data is the most common frame of reference for measuring the impact of companies.
The problem is that it focuses almost exclusively on how instead of what. We measure and track processes (how we do what we set out to do), not the product itself (what we actually do).
But even if traditional sustainability data would be insufficient on its own, it tells us something about the spirit of the age—one that shows interest in social and ecological sustainability and impact.
When we look at the data we gather from startups at Slush, we can see that an increasing number are attempting to solve one or more of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
What’s more, European startups at Slush are more likely to address UN SDGs in comparison to their North American counterparts.
It is clear that the European ecosystem cares about impact. It is just less clear what we mean by it. And even less clear how we could measure it.
We should focus on the what instead of the how;
on value creation instead of processes.
Something essential appears to be missing from the overall picture.
When we think about something as fundamental as the societal purpose and meaning of the companies we built, we cannot be satisfied with self-reported intentions. Anyone can claim to address socially responsible goals and targets.
Neither can we only track and measure the processes by which we operate. Any company can reach carbon neutrality, but not all carbon-neutral companies have an equally positive impact on the surrounding society.
We need to turn our attention back to the basics: how value is created. This means focusing on the core business model of a given company: what does the company do with the resources it uses?
This means that there is no separation between impact companies and regular companies—every business affects the world around us.
Each company brings both costs and benefits to the world—the key is to build ones where the positives clearly outweigh the negatives.
Upright’s founder and CEO Annu Nieminen says:
“Investing and building startups is hard. Many investors and founders do that hard work because they genuinely want to be on the good side of history. At Upright, we work to provide them with the data to quantify whether they actually are there: backing and building companies that are truly bringing more benefits than costs to the world. The end goal is clear: We want to build a world where it is financially more attractive to run a net positive company than a net negative one.”
Case study
Let’s take a closer look at the real-world impact of six startups that take the stage at Slush 2024 through Upright’s impact data engine. All of these high-growth companies are aspirational in impact—but all in different ways that many will find surprising.
To understand how Upright quantifies the impact of companies based on a large scientific corpus, head to the methodology section at the end.
1. Anthropic: The modern world runs on knowledge – we should measure it
Explore Anthropic on the Upright Platform
What business are they in?
Anthropic is a safety-focused AI lab that develops large language models (LLMs) and general-purpose tools built on top of them.
What critical problem are they tackling?
With the rapid progress of AI comes a critical need for ensuring that these technologies are both safe and aligned with human objectives. Many AI models can produce harmful outputs, behave unpredictably, or be misused in ways that undermine trust and safety. Anthropic seeks to tackle this by developing transparent AI systems with guardrails and safety measures that are less prone to misuse or misaligned behavior.
Given that knowledge work by humans and machines is the main driver of development in today’s world, it is quite perplexing that impacts on knowledge distribution and creation are not even accounted for in traditional metrics on corporate sustainability. How can the impact of an LLM, media house or social media platform be understood without examining the knowledge dimension? The Upright net impact model aims to change this, and identifies Anthropic as especially efficient in distributing knowledge.
So, what’s their impact?
Antropics’s products are rooted in safety-focused AI research, with contributions to creating and distributing knowledge placing them in the top 5% of 50,000+ companies for positive knowledge impact in the Upright database.
However, companies developing LLMs also face significant trade-offs, as the computational resources needed for training large-scale models come with high environmental costs. Additionally, the development of LLMs poses considerable risks to societal stability in both the short-term and the long-term.
2. Vinted: Sustainable fashion doesn’t exist – but secondhand is the best alternative
Explore Vinted on the Upright Platform
What business are they in?
Vinted operates an online peer-to-peer marketplace for secondhand clothes, accessories, electronics, and entertainment.
What critical problem are they tackling?
The devastating environmental impact of fast fashion is well-known and documented. For example, according to EU statistics, the fashion industry accounts for 10% of global emissions – more than international flights and maritime combined.
This won’t be solved by making newly produced clothes slightly more “sustainable”, e.g. by switching to organic or partly recycled materials. The only way forward is to reduce and reuse clothes. Making secondhand shopping a comparable alternative to buying new clothes is essential.
So, what’s their impact?
When shopping secondhand on Vinted leads to fewer new clothes being produced, it significantly contributes to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and textile waste.
However, it’s important to consider the full story: Does secondhand buying genuinely replace new purchases? Or do cheap prices rather encourage overconsumption, resulting in consumers buying used clothes in addition to new clothes?
Buying and shipping clothes, even second hand ones, also comes with environmental costs. More research is needed on the true impact of secondhand market places on consumer behavior.
3. Aira: Want to invest in impact? Go for the unsexy industries
Explore Aira on the Upright Platform
What business are they in?
Aira produces, sells, leases and installs energy-efficient, water-based air heat pumps for homes, offering an alternative to traditional home heating systems like oil boilers.
What critical problem are they tackling?
People need warm homes, but traditional home heating systems come with high environmental impacts – particularly fossil fuel boilers. EU figures show that residential space heating accounted for 18% of final energy consumption in the EU in 2021, and that replacing a third of EU’s residential fossil fuel boilers with heat pumps could cut those households’ final energy consumption by over one-third.
So, what’s their impact?
Aira exemplifies how infrastructure companies can be some of the most impactful ones. By replacing fossil-based heaters with air heat pumps, Aira significantly reduces greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption, placing it in the top 7% of over 50,000 companies in Upright’s database for positive greenhouse gas emissions impact. Beyond environmental benefits, Aira contributes to social infrastructure by providing reliable home heating, a basic human need.
It’s important to note, however, that the overall impact of heat pumps depends heavily on the energy source powering them, making it crucial to consider the energy mix in each region when assessing heat pumps’ true impact.
4. Gaia Family: Fertility is a question of human rights – and money
Explore Gaia Family on the Upright Platform
What business are they in?
Gaia Family is a finance company in the space of fertility: they offer insurance and financing solutions, namely installment loans, to make IVF more accessible. Customers only repay their fertility treatments over a longer period of time when they have a child.
What critical problem are they tackling?
Infertility rates are rising across the Western world, and access to fertility treatment is often limited by financial constraints, adding to the mental burden of undergoing IVF. Additionally, non-heterosexual couples often face even greater barriers in accessing treatment..
So, what’s their impact?
By lowering barriers of entry to fertility treatments, Gaia Family ranks in the top 10% in Upright’s database of 50,000 companies for equality and human rights, showing how financial products can also drive progress in critical social issues. They also create significant meaning and joy – an impact that is rarely quantified but is at the core of value creation for companies like Gaia Family. Like all installment loans, their services can also contribute negatively to mental health due to the stress of managing debt. However, as most parents will tell you, the positives clearly outweigh the negatives in reaching parenthood.
5. Commure: Technologies don’t have an impact, their use cases do
Explore Commure on the Upright Platform
What business are they in?
Commure provides software solutions for the healthcare industry, including e.g. AI-powered tools for medical report dictation, operating systems, and patient flow management systems.
What critical problem are they tackling?
Healthcare systems globally are struggling under the weight of aging populations and staff shortages. Commure’s technology alleviates these pressures by allowing humans to focus on what they do best, while automating administrative tasks.
So, what’s their impact?
Commure’s products rank them in the top 9% for positive impact on physical diseases out of 50,000 companies in Upright’s database, which is especially remarkable for a Saas company.
To operate, Commure needs to employ a lot of highly-educated staff, reflected as a cost in “scarce human capital” in the Upright model. This is the opportunity cost of not using this skilled workforce elsewhere – and something that most all technology companies create. However, Commure directs this talent toward solving critical healthcare challenges, resulting in an overall net positive business.
Commure’s example highlights two key points about the impact of software companies: 1) Technologies themselves don’t determine impact, but their use cases do. For example, Commure’s technological stack might be used for developing online gaming or adtech solutions, which would lead to a very different impact profile. 2) For a company to be net positive, its skilled workforce needs to create impactful solutions, as Commure does by creating technologies that improve healthcare outcomes.
6. Solugen: Emissions are not the only culprit – other environmental impacts need the spotlight, too
Explore Solugen on the Upright Platform
What business are they in?
Solugen is a chemical company that produces fermentable sugar-based biochemicals for various everyday applications, including water treatment, hygiene products, and concrete production.
What critical problem are they tackling?
Chemicals are integral to nearly every manufactured good globally, but their production and use come with big negative environmental impacts, including greenhouse gas emissions, ecosystem degradation, biodiversity loss, and human health issues. Being able to compare the various costs and benefits that different chemical alternatives have not just on emissions, but also waste, scarce natural resources, and biodiversity, is crucial for finding the right technologies for the future.
So, what’s their impact?
Offering biobased, less toxic alternatives to traditional chemicals creates significant positive environmental impacts: Reducing toxic pollutants and minimizing the harmful effects of waste places Solugen in the top 10% of companies for countering non-GHG emissions and waste impacts among the 50,000+ companies in Upright’s database.
However, like for all service providers, the overall impact of Solugen’s products can vary depending on the industries they serve and the concrete processes they change and replace. For example, their solutions for water treatment may have different impacts than products offered for oil production, highlighting the need to understand not just Solugen’s own internal impacts, but also those of its customers.
Methodology: How did Upright quantify the impact?
Upright has built an unforeseen data model that maps knowledge from the global corpus of scientific publications to products and services of all companies globally.
Since 2017, Upright has been building a data model to quantify companies’ holistic impacts on the surrounding world. Upright’s approach is utterly different from the traditional ESG approach. Traditional ESG analyses emphasize companies’ internal practices, behaviors, and processes as indicators of risk management, regulatory compliance, and long-term shareholder value creation. They ask: How does a company do what it does? How does it behave, report, and run its processes – and how does that impact their ability to make money? In ESG, e.g. a tobacco or fossil fuel company can perform relatively well as long as it’s got robust internal processes in place.
As opposed to this old-school ESG framework, Upright’s model aims to focus on the what: Not how companies run internal operations, but what they are actually producing in the world. In other words, Upright assesses the impact of companies’ core business activities across environmental and social matters – an area that many think of when talking about “sustainability” but where data is not well established. In Upright’s model, tobacco or fossil fuel companies can not get a get-out-of-jail card for diligent reporting, but their massive negative real-world impacts on humans and the environment will be quantified as they are.
The Upright data engine lays on a few main building blocks. The foundation for all quantification is the product model, which consists of impact data for a highly granular graph of 150,000 products and services, along with their value chain and market size data. For example, producing a car requires all kinds of materials (upstream impact) and creates environmental impacts when it’s used (downstream impact).
Upright assesses the impact of each product and service based on scientific research (CORE database being the main source) and other validated databases, such as WHO, Eurostat, IPCC, and World Bank, leveraging causality classification – a method for identifying and categorizing the relationships between causes and effects – through a proprietary natural language processing model.
The next level of Upright’s data engine is the company model that maps companies’ granular sets of business activities – what products and services they sell – against the product model. Due to the modular –- or in tech language, composable – data architecture of the Upright model, the same trick can then be done to arrive at investment funds, portfolios, or any weighted groups of companies.
As a result, Upright has created a database on the impact of 50,000 companies, with the coverage continuously increasing, based on a science-based, data-driven assessment of the companies’ core business. The database is hosted openly at uprightplatform.com.
Read more about Upright:
Upright website: the mission of Upright’s impact data
Upright Knowledge Base: detailed metrics and methodology descriptions
Upright Platform: explore live data on the world’s largest open database on company & fund impact