Upright launches unprecedented data on PE/VC funds’ real-world impact

Why does this matter?

Private Equity is a 13trn dollar industry (source: McKinsey) with unique opportunities to shape the global economy through PE investors’ active investing mode, close relationships with portfolio companies, and longer investment horizons.

However, the sector’s sustainability has long been considered “impossible to measure”, due to the limited availability of sustainability disclosures from unlisted portfolio companies.

We took a look at recent sustainability and impact reports by some of the leading global private equity investors, such as Blackstone, KKR, Carlyle and CVC. Here’s what we found:

Climate, DEI, employee training and wellbeing, and compliance – that is where sustainability focuses in PE. Among these, climate is the only theme examining external impacts; others focus internally on portfolio operations. Of course, things like gender equality or wellbeing in teams are crucial questions in PE – yet only a small part of an investors’ actual impact.

The most significant driver of PEs' real-world impact lies in the products and services of portfolio companies: how they use resources, create value, and affect the world.

Upright takes a radically different approach by quantifying these core business impacts by portfolio companies’, enabling science-based, comparable assessments of any PE fund – independent of ESG disclosure availability.

To our knowledge, no other solution provides insight into PE’s true impact on people and the planet.

What will you find?

For benchmarking impact performance, anyone can now access open impact quantifications for 1,000+ funds across Buyout, Growth and Venture Capital globally, focusing on Europe and the U.S.

Upright's customers are able view full lists of holdings for these funds, including 20,000+ portfolio companies, for details on what contributes to their impact on the environment, society, health and knowledge.

And, as already for years, Upright's customers also get the impact of their own portfolio quantified with greater detail.

How did Upright do this?

This is not new for us.

This launch builds on Upright’s September release of impact data for 35,000+ mutual funds and ETFs, continuing our mission to equip financial markets with science-dictated data for improved decision-making and reporting.

Furthermore, for the past seven years, Upright has been building the world's most granular product-level data on company impact using advanced machine-learning technologies. Throughout this journey, we've provided impact quantifications for leading GPs and LPs including EQT, LGT Capital Partners, APG, Lightrock, and Summa Equity.

In practice, we produce data by using natural language processing (NLP) technologies to read a massive corpus of scientific articles, public databases from the likes of OECD, WHO and Eurostat, and company reporting. By integrating information from these sources, we map the data first to effectively all products and services traded in global markets to form an evidence-based understanding of their impact. Then, we extend this impact data first to companies, and ultimately to funds based on their holdings.

Our approach allows us to quantify impact of PE/VC funds independently of whether portfolio companies provide ESG disclosures.

To learn more about Upright’s data model, explore:

• Upright's mission
• Upright's methodology documentation on our Knowledge Base

Who is this for?

General Partners (GPs) in PE/VC

If you believe that impact is central to future-proofing your value creation, long-term profits, and securing funding and talent, our analysis offers a clear view of where you stand among peers.

Limited Partners (LPs)

Our data gives you a rigorous framework to assess GP impact performance with full comparability, enabling more informed investment decisions.

Anyone interested in the impact of PE/VC money on the world

With PE/VC attracting substantial capital, talent, and attention, Upright wants to offer everyone a way to explore what kind of a world these resources are actually building.