Speedinvest is a leading pan-European seed investor with offices in Berlin, Munich, London, Paris, San Francisco and Vienna. They have made it their mission to empower portfolio companies throughout their journey with actionable, aligned and game-changing support.
Speedinvest is also committed to take action against climate change and now works with Planetly to analyse the company’s carbon footprint in order to identify effective measures to further reduce carbon emissions.
In 2019, Speedinvest committed to becoming a carbon neutral company and began actively monitoring, reducing and offsetting its emissions.
As an investor, Speedinvest actively backs Climate Tech startups leading the change, including Greyparrot, Sylvera, Refurbed, and Planetly who are from now Speedinvest’s official partner in measuring and further reducing our emissions.
As an active member of Leaders for Climate Action (LFCA), Speedinvest chose to make its climate action initiatives and goals more transparent.
To calculate the carbon footprint, we took a closer look at all relevant activities across Speedinvest’s operations. This includes not only direct and energy-related emissions (Scope 1 & 2) but also indirect emissions caused by purchased goods and services and other emissions that occur outside the organisation (Scope 3). Speedinvest’s investment portfolio is not yet included in this analysis.
We calculated the various types of emissions in CO2 equivalents (short: CO2e) to make them addable and comparable.
The largest share of Speedinvest’s carbon footprint comes from building emissions such as electricity in the offices, followed by employee emissions such as business travel, employee commute and home office. Speedinvest reduced travel emissions in 2020 compared to 2019, however, this was mainly due to COVID-19 lockdowns. With new travel policies in place, Speedinvest is committed to keep reducing travel emissions moving forward.
The third largest share of emissions comes from purchased goods and services Speedinvest uses.
Speedinvest is committed to avoid unnecessary emissions and to reduce and offset unavoidable emissions. Following a step-by-step approach, they have already started implementing a couple of small but concrete and impactful changes, including changing to refurbished electronics, introducing a “train-first” travel policy and reducing unnecessary business travel.
This year, Speedinvest aims to have completed a sustainability audit of the partners and vendors they work with, including banks, internet services, energy utilities, office suppliers, food providers and more. Speedinvest also made it part of its DNA to support founders in its portfolio in lowering their carbon footprint.
While avoiding and reducing emissions is the main focus for Speedinvest, they have decided to offset emissions that cannot yet be avoided to have an immediate impact. To do so, Speedinvest supports certified climate projects in Indonesia, Kenya and Ethiopia.
The REDD+ project in Indonesia protects 64,500 hectares of carbon-rich peat swamp forests with a high biodiversity in lowland Borneo from the conversion to palm oil plantations. In addition, local communities are supported by providing training in sustainable agriculture, and biodiversity and wildlife habitat. The project contributes to all 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
In Kenya and Ethiopia, Speedinvests supports projects that install efficient cooking stoves to prevent the deforestation and burning of wood. The project in Kenya significantly reduces deforestation of the Kakamega rainforest, Kenya's last remaining indigenous forest, and improves the livelihood of local communities. The project in Ethiopia collaborates with Fairtrade Netherlands to distribute cleaner cookstoves to households of rural coffee farmers.
All projects are certified by the highest standards, including Gold Standard, the Voluntary Carbon Standard (VCS) and the Fairtrade Climate Standard.