Companies have discovered that sustainability is "a competitive advantage," according to this Spanish startup that helps them measure the impact of their policies

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Sustainability is one of the buzzwords in the business environment. According to the World Economic Forum, if companies prioritized environmental sustainability they could create business opportunities for 8.7 billion euros and 395 million jobs in the next 10 years; and investments with sustainable criteria are already beginning to offer higher returns than traditional assets. What used to be seen as an image element or a legal obligation is beginning to be perceived by some companies as a differential element for their business.

“More and more companies are beginning to perceive that sustainability has an economic return: they see that their companies are better perceived by stakeholders. It is no longer just that they demand it, but that it is a competitive advantage that is transformed into economic benefit,” Johanna Gallo, co-founder of the startup APlanet, which offers a technological tool for collecting and measuring data on sustainability that is already used by more than a hundred companies, told Business Insider España.

In her experience, the approach to sustainability in companies has changed. “A few years ago it was pure compliance, they had to submit a report and collect data; now they see that there is a value behind it all, which allows them to differentiate themselves and be the first,” he explains. In addition, the adoption of measures of this type by the leading companies in each sector causes “a dragging effect, because others want to compare themselves with them”.

APlanet was started two years ago by Johanna Gallo and Cyril Pierre. Neither of them had worked in sustainability before but in technology. “I was working at Amazon and he was working at eBay. We detected that there was a need to manage that data and, if other departments had technologies, there was a big need to apply technological tools in the areas of sustainability,” he says.

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With the aim of bringing technology to this area and the “personal desire to create technology with a social impact,” they launched the project. They did so by applying the lean methodology, talking to potential customers to generate a minimum viable product quickly, and test it with companies to improve it with their experience.

“We help any type of organization to manage its sustainability efficiently,” explains Gallo. They do this in two ways: by optimizing the processes of sustainability departments, automating “routine tasks that add little value”, and by extracting the data that companies usually report externally and internally to extract valuable information and detect risks. “Until now this was done manually, with Excel, pencil, and paper, and what we offer is to do it in a more efficient way,” he adds.

Among the data they collect are non-financial data, which many companies have to compile by regulation (environmental policies, gender equality plans, family reconciliation, fight against corruption and bribery, tax information…), social action information (corporate volunteering, donations to social organizations), environmental measures (carbon footprint) and good governance (supplier hiring policies, management of profits or investments).

The tool, with an annual subscription business model, connects with the services already used by each company or allows them to be entered manually or from spreadsheets, and consolidates information from different sources to give the company the main indicators on issues such as equality or the environment, but also specific indicators for certain sectors. “There are organizations that have it very clear, and others that ask you to help them to know what information to collect depending on their sector or the Non-Financial Reporting Act,” says Gallo.

More than 120 customers in Spain, Portugal, and Brazil

Developing the tool in a lean way caused them to first collaborate with companies that were already working in sustainability to help them with data management and reporting. “We were lucky because these companies understood that we were developing at the same time and we have done it according to their needs,” explains the co-founder of APlanet.

The result of this process is that they have more than 120 clients, almost equally divided between Spain, Portugal, and Brazil. “Sometimes I am asked if one market is better than another, what we have discovered is that it is a global need. Regulation exists in almost every country and so does the pressure on companies; before it used to be said that energy companies were under more pressure, now it is in all sectors,” Galllo points out.

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His clients include financial institutions, energy companies, food companies, construction companies, educational institutions such as schools and universities, and media companies. Companies such as the insurance company Zurich, the energy company EDP, Leroy Merlin, the financial entity WiZink and educational institutions such as IE and CEF, or soccer clubs such as Benfica in Portugal are among its client portfolio.

Pandemic does not slow down APlanet, which doubled its turnover in 2020

The impact of the coronavirus has not slowed down this young company, which doubled its turnover in 2020 despite having felt the impact from March to May due to the stage of strict containment. Once it had overcome it, it recovered the pace of activity, as the obligation to present non-financial information “was still there” for many companies.

A need that, according to Gallo, will only grow in the coming years. “Companies have become aware of the need to lay the foundations for any crisis, to have social and environmental data under control, and the administration is increasingly focusing on the need for companies to operate in a sustainable manner. This is causing us to detect even more need than before. European Union subsidies are including sustainability criteria,” he explains.

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With All Iron Ventures, Banco Sabadell’s BStartup fund, Draper B1 (formerly BBooster), and the public company Enisa among its investors, with which they have raised €1.7 million in funding, APlanet already has a team of 24 people and expects to continue growing. “If there is something nice about sustainability is that it grows by leaps and bounds, every day new standards and formulas emerge… It is something that is super interesting from the point of view of technology and product and it is good that companies have the technology to incorporate it,” concludes Johanna Gallo.

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