Who is Tekudo and why we started this blog?

Welcome to TEKUDO

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TEKUDO is a Copenhagen based tech and consulting company on the mission to make venture capital and private equity the most sustainable asset class. The company was founded by Pascal Franke and Vasile Popescu at the beginning of 2022.

"Our mission is to help the private equity industry, private equity and venture capital investors as well as non-listed growth companies, on its sustainability transformation”, says the CEO of the company, Pascal Franke. Incorporating sustainability and ESG - Environmental, Social, Governance, into companies is slowly becoming a norm driven by regulators and consumers and society as a whole. It is increasingly becoming a business enabler, allowing access to capital or talent, boosting sales or simply enabling companies to sell to corporates who require their suppliers to provide sustainability data, as Pascal explains. 

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Why ESG matters and is here to stay

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The rising profile of ESG has largely started with listed companies where the ESG industry and practices are a lot more evolved. While non-listed companies and investors in the private equity space have been lagging behind, they are now catching up, driven by society, changes in consumer behaviour, investors (limited partners) and very much by regulators across the world. The regulators such as the European Commission, are laying a strong foundation for every company and investor to report on sustainability metrics, just as it is a standard to report on financial data. The EU Taxonomy, the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) and Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) are some of the regulations that are pushing for a more sustainable future. Tekudo's purpose is to enable more sustainable future proof businesses, by facilitating and accelerating that transformation. It poses great challenges especially for smaller companies and investors who can't rely on large sustainability teams or external consultants, therefore Tekudo mission is to help them overcome it. 

The story of TEKUDO starts with the passion for sustainability and making an impact. "We are firm believers that sustainability should be built into a company's DNA from day one, how you operate, what your north star is; especially for tech companies, where everything is built for scale and sustainability should not be an exception", underlines the CEO of the company.

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‍What Tekudo does

While ESG is likely to evolve and have a great impact in the coming years, its underlying impulse is here to stay. Tekudo is here to help and show how companies can take a more systematic and rewarding approach to ESG.  What Tekudo does: 2 things. Software and consulting. It simplifies ESG - Environmental, social, and corporate governance, and Impact integration for private equity investors (VC and PE) and start-ups with their integrated software platform. 

We see ourselves as an aggregator with a focus on automation, which is why we are integrating with software that the companies are already using or should be using, such as carbon accounting tools or HR software and hosting providers such as AWS or Google Cloud in order to automate the data collection of relevant sustainability and ESG data metrics such as diversity ratios, gender pay-gap data, CO2 data, energy consumption, % of renewable energy use, etc

Secondly, Tekudo offers consulting services as there is a great lack of knowledge and experience in the market. The company has strong expertise in the field of ESG with a specialisation in the private equity industry. They have a good understanding about the problems and where the industry is headed, deriving learnings from the more mature world of listed companies. "There is limited experience and know-how in the private equity industry and with smaller companies on how to build better and more sustainable businesses. ESG is still a fairly new practice and there are many failures and learnings we need to go through to improve it. “

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Purpose of the Tekudo blog

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“With the blog, our aim is to educate the market to reduce that knowledge gap. Investors and companies are struggling to implement ESG and with the blog we want to share hands-on examples and advice, industry best-practices, latest developments, and overall knowledge around ESG and impact with a focus on private equity, venture capital and growth companies. So hopefully we can accelerate the sustainability transformation by sharing the learnings and avoiding replicating mistakes we have already learned from.” Pascal Franke

“The mission of Tekudo is to make the VC and the PE markets more sustainable. There is a lot of ESG data on the public markets, all the companies have to report on ESG, but not the private companies. So, that's where we step in. We'll try to help the VCs to begin with. We're aiming to become a deep platform  where you can find sustainability data, ESG data for private companies and then, to offer access to these data to companies in order to become more sustainable.” Vasile Popescu

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Before building TEKUDO, we were ourselves in the position where we needed sustainability data on non-listed companies. We were working on a revenue-based financing solution where we only wanted to finance growth companies that are sustainable. But we couldn’t automate the model as we couldn’t find any sustainability data on those companies, that’s why we decided to change that and to build the infrastructure ourselves. This led us to what we are doing today.

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Join us and please do follow Tekudo’s journey on this blog for in-depth content around ESG, impact and sustainability regulation in Venture Capital and Private Equity.

For more condensed and ad-hoc content also follow us on Linkedin:

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