ESG Findings

In order to create action-oriented impact and ESG understanding, we have chosen to design our annual survey based on our portfolio materiality assessment. This is a weighted compilation of the most important ESG areas in the industries that we invest in. By doing this each year, we can consistently guarantee that our metrics remain pertinent to our portfolio.

<aside> 💡 Access our materiality Deep dive here

</aside>

In 2022, our companies’ most pivotal ESG topics were Responsible Product Design, Employee Health & Wellbeing, Data Privacy & Security, and Diversity & Inclusion.

And as a first and perhaps most important finding of the survey, we were very happy to find that over 70% have implemented initiatives focusing on critical areas such as employee wellbeing, data management and anti-discrimination measures.

While the majority of companies don’t have a dedicated individual to steer these crucial policies, we’ve seen a rapid adoption of ESG leads as well as environmental and social topics being incorporated in management roles. As we move forward, this is a key area where we can offer strategic guidance – and assist our portfolio companies in driving change, more specifically by learning from what others have done and adding dedicated talent.

<aside> 💡 Access our Technology Risk Deep dive here

</aside>

Diversity and gender pay gap recommendation

Expectations of founders in understanding and responding to the challenges societies face are rightly high, especially when it comes to VC-backed companies. For us, building a gender-diverse team is core to business models being future-proof. We, ourselves have a 50/50 gender split in the investment team, and a majority of female staff across the entire business – hopefully inspiring our founders to do the same while actively looking at increasing our exposure to female-founded companies.

Across our active portfolio, we’re seeing encouraging growth in gender diversity: 15% of our founding teams, 17% of our board members, and 19% of senior management identify as female. While we know it’s not enough, we’ve seen this dataset improving through the years and know our companies are deploying serious strategies to improve gender balance.

For the first time, we also measured Unadjusted Pay Gap in the portfolio this year. Our initial findings show that employees identifying as male earn 17% more than women, regardless of role or seniority – this is slightly better than the industry’s 23% average (source: Ravio) and has still obviously room to grow.

We are recommending that all our companies start measuring their unadjusted gender pay gap in 2023 as we believe it’s a very actionable number. We will be working closely with our portfolio company Ravio to support the portfolio on how to measure and address this gap going forward.

<aside> 💡 Access our Gender Pay gap Deep Dive here

</aside>