Companies looking to advance the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and support startups get their solutions to market by using a new digital match-making platform, fetch. The Dutch-based enterprise helps bring together potential collaborators by showcasing market-ready innovations and allowing companies to search by SDG or industry category to find the ones that align with their corporate sustainability goals.
Companies looking to advance the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and support startups get their solutions to market by using a new digital match-making platform, fetch. The Dutch-based enterprise helps bring together potential collaborators by showcasing market-ready innovations and allowing companies to search by SDG or industry category to find the ones that align with their corporate sustainability goals.
According to a report by the Business & Sustainable Development Commission, embedding sustainability and aligning business operations with the SDGs to could open economic opportunities worth up to US$12 trillion and increase employment by up to 380 million jobs by 2030.
Corporates can use fetch as a source of innovations that can help them fulfill their sustainability commitments while understanding how with the implementation of the solutions these startups provide can tackle the SDGs.
With strategic partners Agora Partnerships and Circle Economy, and TechForGood as a content partner, fetch launched the platform this week with over 200 market-ready sustainability and social-driven startups and innovations featured on fetch. Startups can add their solutions to the collection by submitting them to the website. Both corporates and solution providers can currently join fetch for free.
fetch aims to become the world’s largest digital platform with a searchable database of sustainability and social innovations around the globe, categorized by SDGs.
“fetch is born from years of research and understanding of what the market needs to make the world a more sustainable place. Through my experience in working with corporates and feedback from startups, I saw a gap and a channel missing in connecting the two together,” said Alison Azaria, founder of fetch. “Much of the time, after startups have successfully gone through the incubator process, they try to promote themselves through various topic-based platforms. While these platforms do serve as a great way for startups to gain exposure, it requires managing many different accounts and profiles. Moreover, corporates will also have to visit these various sites to look for what they want. The idea for fetch is to create one global digital platform where members can search for innovations that align with their goals around all topics under the sustainability umbrella and the SDGs.”
True to the collaboration-focused SDG 17, fetch plans to continue to evolve and partner with sustainability incubators, innovation centers, knowledge hubs and sustainability media platforms to serve the corporations and startups trying to achieve operational sustainability, get products to market, and tackle the SDGs.
A similar platform for connecting social entrepreneurs with investors, Global Opportunity Explorer, was launched last year.
Published May 1, 2018 3pm EDT / 12pm PDT / 8pm BST / 9pm CEST