Innovation & Technology

Upright:
The World’s First Database for Measuring Corporate Net Impacts

The Upright Project’s net-impact model measures companies’ positive and negative impacts on the environment, health, society and knowledge — enabling smarter decision-making for investors, companies and their customers.

By Scarlett Buckley | Published 4 months ago | About a 6 minute read

Image: Upright Project

Companies influence the world in more ways than we ever could imagine. But how can we understand their true impacts, beyond the bottom line or shareholder value?

While conventional sustainability and Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) data provide some insights, they focus on internal processes and rely on company reporting — so, they fall short when it comes to shedding light on a company's core business’s holistic impact on the world. Therefore, to answer this question, we need a comprehensive way to understand all the ways in which a company — through its operations, products and services — contributes positively and negatively to the world.

Enter Upright — a Finnish startup that has developed a proprietary net-impact model to provide clarity into the murky waters of corporate impact assessment. The model goes beyond traditional sustainability metrics and offers an extensive analysis of a company's overall contribution to society, health, knowledge and the environment — producing science-based impact data that is comparable across industries and company sizes.

Upright measures value creation with a top-down approach — it estimates the costs and benefits created by companies using a model of the whole private sector, encompassing all products and services traded in global markets, based on classical measures of economic cost used by The World Bank, WHO, IMF and others. The results of the model are used to allocate shares of costs and benefits within different categories to each company.

Upright’s mathematical model, enabled by Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology, scans through over 200 million academic sources to translate academic insights into digestible information on how companies utilize resources and create value. The model provides a holistic view of companies' net impact — the sum of a company’s positive and negative impacts — on the world. It quantifies both positive and negative effects across key dimensions including environment, health, society and knowledge — including 20 sub-categories such as mental diseases, scarce human capital, biodiversity and societal stability — empowering companies and their stakeholders to make informed decisions on where to direct their time, money and effort to drive positive change. The end goal is to make it more profitable to run a net-positive business.

Along with standard impact criteria such as emissions and jobs created, Upright considers a company's use of critical resources such as scarce human capital ("nerd years") and assesses whether its overall positive impacts justify its use | Image credit: Upright Project

“We need to transform resource use in the private sector to maximize benefits for people and minimize harm to the environment,” Upright founder & CEO Annu Nieminen tells Sustainable Brands® (SB). “Better resource allocation is impossible without a clear understanding of costs and benefits created, which net-impact thinking offers.”

Before founding Upright, Nieminen worked as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company. While working with companies’ financial valuations, she was shocked to realize that no one was creating the required data to measure and compare companies’ positive and negative impacts on people, our health, society and the environment.

Nieminen went looking for a project that was working on a solution but couldn’t find one in academia or Silicon Valley. This prompted her to start the Upright Project in 2017, to solve what she calls “the toughest problem I’ve ever thought of” — measuring the real-world impacts of companies’ products and services in a way that is science-based yet common-sensed and scalable, comparable and independent of companies’ own reporting.

The Upright model

Nieminen says the Upright model dynamically evolves alongside the global, private economy — integrating new products, services, companies and advancements in impact-measurement science daily. Upright regularly releases updated versions of the model quarterly to its users.

“Impact measurement is a maturing field, and so methodologies for calculating the impact that companies have on the world around them are in continuous development,” she explains. “Upright was a pioneer in this field seven years ago, when the company was founded — and has since then developed its own approach and model, while simultaneously actively engaging in impact-related academic research. In 2024, for example, we are collaborating with the ESG Initiative at the Wharton School for a research project on impact monetization.”

The production of Upright’s data is split between computers and humans. NLP is used to process, read and interpret massive amounts of data; the company’s scientists and analysts structure the questions, set the parameters and sanity-check the results.

Business decision making

“The way we see it: If someone promises an easy way to take care of sustainability for you, run — there is no easy way out of business sustainability. It is a profound, complex issue that can’t be ignored anymore,” Nieminen asserts. “We solemnly believe that adopting the thinking logic behind Upright’s complex data model can save company executives and investors significant time, money — and, eventually, their business — because it brings to focus the real transformation happening behind today’s increasingly noisy sustainability discussion.”

Over 200 professional investors and companies worldwide now leverage Upright's impact data to understand, report and articulate their net impact to the world. In addition to providing net-impact assessments, Upright offers data on alignment with the UN Sustainable Development Goals; as well as the EU’s ESRS and CSRD double-materiality assessments, EU Taxonomy and SFDR principal adverse impact (PAI) indicators. Customers can enjoy unrestricted access to this data through Upright's online platform and API, with tailored coverage of both listed and unlisted companies available upon request.

Available to all

To increase global understanding of companies’ real-world impacts, Upright believes that impact data should be available for everyone — not just for asset managers and sustainability professionals. Democratizing access helps consumers, employees, researchers and the media make informed decisions. The Upright Platform is the world's largest public database on company impact, with 10,000+ company profiles free for anyone to explore; and subscribers can access data on the impact of 50,000+ more listed and unlisted firms across various industries. Upright’s data engine, based on 150,000 products and services, is a rich resource for understanding global trade dynamics.

“In five years, we hope that the Upright Platform will host public impact data on all companies with 10+ employees and a sensible internet presence (ex: a web page or an online store) globally. The result would be a Wikipedia of company impact of sorts,” Nieminen explains. “The goal is that when anyone wants to understand the impact of a company — instead of relying on the companies’ disclosures or marketing materials — they can easily refer to science-based, open-source knowledge. That’s something that is needed to incentivize massive transformations in resource allocation in the global economy.”