Top Performers Balderton Capital

Balderton Capital is a UK-based investment firm with over two decades of experience investing in early-stage and growth-stage start-ups in Europe. Balderton has $6.4bn in AUM across the information technology and fintech sectors. Balderton applies 10 of the UN’s SDGs within its Sustainable Future Goals (SFG) Framework. The SFGs include environmental (urgent climate action, responsible consumption, green cities, and renewable energy), social (fairness and equal opportunities, gender equality, diversity and inclusion, good health and well-being, and lifelong learning), and governance axes (highest ethical and governance standards, and data rights are human rights). The framework guides Balderton’s ESG strategy by applying all 10 SFGs across all three dimensions of their firm: Internal Operations, Portfolio Companies, and Investment Decision Making. Balderton is also a signatory to the UN PRI to guide investment processes.

Lakestar Ventures

Lakestar Ventures is a venture capital firm that invests in early and growth-stage digital and technology companies. Its strong performance across all four areas of the VC Index is reflective of its comprehensive and embedded approach to ESG. It is a signatory to the UN PRI and is committed to investing responsibly. ESG is integrated into its investment decisionmaking process, risk assessments, ownership practices, and disclosure requirements. Lakestar Ventures holds both itself and its portfolio companies to high ESG standards. In-house, it measures and offsets its carbon footprint and manages resource use consciously in an effort to become carbon neutral.

Colin Hanna Partner, Balderton Capital

‘A year has passed since Balderton adopted our Sustainable Future Goals (SFGs). More than simply a framework, our SFGs are an OKR (Objective & Key Result) tree that maps across Balderton along three axes: our internal operations, our investment decision making, and the Balderton portfolio.

These OKRs are organised within our ten SFGs, which were modelled after and inspired by the UN SDGs. The reason we opted to use an OKR tree as our impact framework for ESG was to ensure that as we embarked upon our ESG journey at Balderton, we prioritised a bias to action. ESG efforts can sometimes become exercises in marketing. By holding ourselves accountable to specific actions we hope to challenge that convention. A clear rubric also means we can grade ourselves objectively along the way.

Alongside the global efforts related to fighting COVID-19, what the last year has taught us is that our behaviour can and has changed profoundly. As societal and business norms shifted, we also began to make dramatic changes to our individual preferences. Any big societal change begins with individual actors, be they people, firms or industries. Once we overcome COVID-19 we will continue to be confronted with the challenges of climate change, gender equality, inequality and unequal access to the basic tools required to compete in tomorrow’s economy. Many of our portfolio companies are already tackling these issues, either with the products and services they build or through how they are choosing to build their companies.’