The Upright Project Receives €5 Million Investment

Finnish startup The Upright Project is on a mission to help us make the right decisions when it comes to impact. The deep tech company has received a 5 million euro investment to develop an open access database that brings more rigor and comparability to impact assessments. As the world overcomes challenges, there has been an increase in awareness in society.

Now, for the most part, there is more scrutiny on a company's impact. There is also more pressure on businesses to be transparent. So consumers also want to know what consequences and impacts their decisions have. Currently ESG reporting is the most common way of assessing how companies impact the world around us, and a reporting tool that is rapidly growing in importance as the climate crisis unfolds. However, it only focuses on a company's financial risks associated with environmental or social issues.

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The Upright Project to Facilitate Impact-Driven Decisions as it Raises €5 Million

Finnish firm The Upright Project wants to go further and measure the net impact of companies and funds on the environment, human health, knowledge production and society. It has raised new funding as appetite for impact reporting grows. Annu Nieminen, Founder and CEO of Upright:

Nick de la Forge, Co-Founder and Partner at Planet A:

Public Impact Data Platform

Founded in 2017, Upright has a purpose-driven vision to create a new kind of measurement model for measuring the net impact of companies. Its platform aims to make more fact-based decisions for investors, customers, employees and businesses. The goal is to bring a new era of analytical rigor and comparability to companies' impact assessments by measuring the sum of a company's positive and negative impacts on the environment, health, society and knowledge.

Upright's AI-based impact data engine is the first to contextualize companies' disclosures and sustainability goals with estimates of EU taxonomy alignment, UN Sustainable Development Goals and Upright's proprietary net impact metrics. The data used comes from the world's largest open access scientific database (over 200 million scientific articles). That means it is collected from company disclosures, market research reports, Eurostat, OECD and other databases.

While there are various providers for ESG reporting or carbon accounting, Upright is perhaps the first to compare companies across sectors not only based on their financial results but also on their overall net impact. The model's approach significantly increases the depth of most Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) metrics such as ESG, SFDR and others that are currently biased by companies' self-reporting and spending power. This means it can be used for a range of use cases. From the asset manager choosing how much to invest in PepsiCo, to the student deciding whether to access a business proposition from Nestle, to the consumer deciding between oat milk brands. Upright will provide fact-based insights that can guide the decision.

Risto Siilasmaa, former President of Nokia and President of F-Secure:

Upright's new impact model will have far-reaching implications. Earlier this year, initial product releases already included publicly available data for the 500 largest companies worldwide. Customers and partners include investors such as financial services company Nasdaq, leading PE/VC investors such as Permira and EQT, and large asset managers such as Invesco and Nordea.