Volution launches ESG and Sustainability Report

At our Investor Day on 26th April, we were delighted to launch Volution’s first ESG and Sustainability Report.

The report outlines the progress we have made against the commitments that we set out as a business and includes results of the annual ESG survey completed by our portfolio companies. 

We have aligned our approach with a subset of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and implemented policies and practices across the three pillars of Environmental, Social and Governance.

We believe that it is important to lead by example and get our own house in order before asking our portfolio companies to do the same. We recognise that the path towards sustainability is not always straightforward, but as VCs and scale-ups, we are learning from each other and moving in the right direction. We have worked closely with associations such as ESG_VC and VentureESG.  

Our firm has made significant progress in incorporating key Social and Governance policies and practices into our operations and we have taken an important step towards addressing the Environmental pillar by calculating our carbon footprint and offsetting our emissions for 2022. 

The Carbon measurement report prepared by Supercritical shows that our emissions for 2022 are at roughly a quarter of the venture capital average benchmark of 12 tonnes per employee. Although we acknowledge that improving upon this baseline year may be challenging, we will take measures to keep our carbon emissions in check and reduce the impact of our scope 3 emissions. Volution has set a target to reach net-zero by 2050 at the very latest. 

As responsible investors, we are incorporating ESG into our investment analysis and decision-making processes for future investments. We have developed our ownership policies and practices for our portfolio, and we promote acceptance and implementation of ESG initiatives within the industry, collaborating on industry reports with the BVCA, Innovate Finance and Atomico, for example. 

To help our portfolio companies progress along their ESG journey, we ask them to complete an annual survey, which helps us to understand where each company stands in terms of ESG and provides benchmarking data for our portfolio teams. We have refined and detailed our Portfolio Carry initiative to incentivise portfolio company management to achieve certain ESG milestones, and we match what they earn with Carbon Carry, which goes towards carbon offsetting and removal projects. 

We are proud to report that our portfolio companies perform particularly well in Governance, Diversity and & Inclusion, Staff wellbeing, and parental policies. The majority of companies in our portfolio have a corporate code of ethics in place and all pay at least the living wage. We hope that our ESG and Carbon Carry initiatives will drive up environmental scores and contribute to sustainability efforts. 

We remain committed to building strong and sustainable businesses that add value beyond capital investment. We will continue to work with our portfolio companies to build together, build community, and build better.  

If you would like to see our report, please register here.