Upright opens its net impact database for the public to increase understanding of real-world impact of companies

• The Upright Project, a Finnish deep tech startup, launches the world’s first open-access database that lets anyone see the net impact that companies have on the environment, the health of people, knowledge creation, and society.
• The Upright platform now shares the net impact and EU Taxonomy data of 10,000+ companies, including S&P 500, FTSE 100, Global Fortune 500, and the world’s most successful unicorns, with a long-term goal of including every company with over 10 employees globally.
• With their AI-driven proprietary model, Upright can share companies’ science-based, comparable impact data without a need for companies’ voluntary disclosures and reporting – a dramatic change in the current status quo of company impact transparency.

The Upright Project has launched the world’s first public and free-to-use database that shares the science-based impact data of 10,000+ companies for anyone to use, ranging from giants like Shell, Nestlé, Tesla and Meta to unlisted startups like SpaceX and OpenAI.

Upright’s proprietary AI-driven data model can calculate and share companies’ net impact – the sum of a company’s negative and positive impact on the environment, the health of people, society, and knowledge creation – removing the need for voluntary reporting or disclosures from companies themselves.

Examples of insight that Upright’s net impact data reveals

• ⅓ of companies on the S&P 500 ESG Index are net negative, including e.g. ExxonMobil and McDonald’s, which challenges the common sentiment that a high ESG rating equals positive impact.
• The impact of professional service providers is largely dependent on who their customers are – a fact that helps answer the heated question of whether consulting firms create more costs or benefits in society.
• Sewer companies rank among the most positively impactful companies in the world, proving that the best impact investment is often not some buzzing new technology company.

The Upright Project poses a direct challenge to traditional Environmental, Social & Governance (ESG) and other “sustainability” metrics. A crucial aspect that sets net impact apart from traditional metrics like ESG is its focus on core business impact. While traditional metrics tend to focus on compliance and ways of working, the net impact model captures how the core business of entire industries and business models impacts areas such as the health of people and society at large. This also means that offsetting or new compliance practices, for example, are not reflected on a company’s net impact score.

Upright’s proprietary data model, supported by natural language processing, is based on the analysis of the world’s largest open-access scientific database (more than 200 million scientific articles), company disclosures, market research reports, Eurostat, OECD, and other databases. The methodology behind the model is available and open for anyone, too.

The latest launch marks the first step on Upright’s long-term mission of openly sharing the impact data of all companies with over 10 employees globally. Today, Upright will openly publish the net impact data of over 10,000 companies, including e.g. companies on the MSCI World, FTSE 100, S&P 500, and Global Fortune 500. The platform also includes data of many well-known unlisted companies, e.g. the most successful unicorns, to bring light on what kind of impact venture capital funds really achieve with regard to climate, health, and knowledge creation.

To advance quality control over regulatory data, Upright will also publish EU Taxonomy data for the 10,000 companies on its platform. This is the world’s largest set of EU Taxonomy data available to date.

Annu Nieminen, Upright Founder and CEO, said: “The majority of sustainability information is typically either reporting jargon or marketing talk. Neither increase people’s understanding of how companies actually impact the world. Instead, we need science-based and common-sense impact data to be available to investors, employees, consumers and business managers themselves to inform better decision-making – and it needs to be accessible, comparable, and transparent.”

“The global conversation around sustainability and ESG has avoided the inconvenient truth that entire industries face tough choices in the years ahead. We need to understand not only where incremental improvements have been made, but also whether the use of resources is creating value in the first place. Causing a little less emissions while doing something of secondary importance does not make an activity net positive.”

Notes to editors

Press contact: Pauliina Bogdanoff, The Upright Project, pauliina.bogdanoff@uprightproject.com or +358 44 0241 616.

About Upright

Upright enables science-based decision-making for investors, companies and employees. The company builds a model based on open science and artificial intelligence to quantify the net impact of companies on the health of people, the planet, society, and knowledge. Upright’s data is used by professional investors and companies to handle their regulatory and voluntary impact reporting. Upright’s model has been used to quantify the net impact of more than 25,000 companies, with customers including 200+ organizations, e.g. Nokia, EQT, Summa Equity, Securitas, Cargotec, Nordea, BlueBay Asset Management, LGT Capital Partners, Permira, Medicover, Fiskars Group, Aktia, and Lightrock. Upright’s proprietary data is globally distributed through Nasdaq Data Hub. In 2022, Upright raised a €5M seed funding round led by the German-based green-tech VC Planet A Ventures alongside First Fellow Partners, a fund founded by renowned investor Risto Siilasmaa, ex-Chair of Nokia and Founder of F-Secure and WithSecure.