Driving the adoption of ESG
in the Venture Capital industry.

About Us

We are a community-based non-profit organisation from VCs for VCs to support the ecosystem with meaningful ESG integration. Together with our growing group of 450+ VC funds and 110+ LPs from across the globe, we are working to make ESG a standard part across the VC value chain, from due diligence and portfolio management to internal fund management and reporting.

Our Mission
in three core tenets

Stakeholder and community focused

The core of our community are VC funds and LPs from a variety of regions, stages and investment sectors. Across steering committees and working groups, we enable knowledge exchange: with calls and expert-led events, we leverage peer-learning in an open-source environment towards the collective establishment of robust ESG integration.

Fit-for-purpose tools and resources

VentureESG was born out of the frustration that existing ESG frameworks are not suitable for venture capital. Based on the needs of our community, we develop VC-specific tools and resources. With input from almost 100 experts, we co-produced a first-of-its-kind ESG framework for VCs; we have also put together ESG policy and Code of Conduct templates, term sheet clauses, a portfolio support tool, and are working on DEI guidance and ‘materiality napkins.’ With our community, we continually update these resources.

From learning to capacity building

The context of emerging technologies, fast-growing teams, defining new markets, and the lack of standardisation makes ESG an important part of helping to build better tech. VentureESG is committed to building the right expertise across the ecosystem to prevent ESG-washing from creeping into VC. Our ‘Leading in ESG’ training is the first step towards building up the necessary ESG knowledge within VC funds and LPs.

VC Members

For LPs

ESG adoption in venture capital is driven not only by VC funds themselves but also very strongly influenced by the requirements of the asset owners—limited partners / LPs—whose capital VCs manage.

Our separate community of 110+ LPs helps us to push for further harmonisation of ESG in VC in the medium term. Primarily through engagements with our fifteen-member LP working group, which includes top state and pension funds as well as foundations, endowments, and Fund-of-Funds in Europe and the US, we are coordinating ESG harmonisation from an LP perspective. Both the wider LP community and our LP working group meet quarterly to enable both peer exchange and standardisation of ESG reporting and practice for VCs.

We have also started to train LP investment, risk, and policy teams, starting with two prominent European state funds.

If you are interested in learning more about our LP work, please get in touch and state that you are an LP.