Streamlining Sustainability Compliance with Smart Technology

Sustainability is one of our core beliefs at xdeck. Why? Because we believe that it is Europe’s duty to pave the way towards decarbonized economic growth. Only through the combination of growth and sustainability, global prosperity can be expanded for future generations. The required transition towards decarbonized economies, as also mandated by regulatory bodies, requires innovations.

Startups can provide these innovations. At xdeck, we focus our efforts on solutions that intertwine sustainability with core business processes. Sunhat is a great example of this as it enables enterprises to automate the fulfillment of their customers’ sustainability requests.

Why is sustainability request management important?

The topic of sustainability in the value chain is becoming ever more multi-layered and complex due to stricter legal guidelines such as the obligations arising from the European Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). As a result, corporations require their suppliers to provide well-founded evidence and detailed statements on specific sustainable developments, such as the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions or the management of internal sustainability targets.

If the evidence is missing or considered insufficient, customer relationships and revenues will be lost. At the same time, the fulfillment of these requirements is a complex, widely manual, and analogous process, as validated in our conversations with sustainability officers. We believe that software can streamline sustainability requests to provide more focus on actually achieving sustainability goals instead of investing time on tedious reporting.

What is Sunhat, and how are they tackling the issue?

Sunhat is a software startup that helps companies to streamline their sustainability request management. More specifically, the software breaks down complicated, text-based requests into manageable to-do-lists, based on Sunhat’s proprietary knowledge library. The library features ratings such as Ecovadis as well as individual documents. Based on the recently developed similarity feature, the software automatically inserts answers that have previously been provided to similar requests / to dos. As a result, the request management process becomes more controllable and scalable. In the future, Sunhat plans to become the central operating system for sustainability management in enterprises.

Why we invested in Sunhat

We perceive a strong need for software solutions in the sustainability space. At the same time, true to our values, we are looking for solutions that solve real pain points. In the case of Sunhat, our reference calls revealed that sustainability officers are overwhelmed with the management of sustainability requests – and the number of requests is likely to further increase. At the same time, the potential damage of non-compliance is high. This provides fertile ground for innovative solutions.

Next to these market- and product-related aspects, every startup’s success is contingent upon a high-performing founder team. Sunhat was founded by a very capable team that combines the sales and fundraising power of Lukas Vogt (CEO), the operational and market-related capabilities of Alexander Behr (COO), and the technological expertise of Ali Kamalizade (CTO). In addition to these skills, all founders have significant professional experience in the fields of venture capital, enterprise sales, and the technological build-up of high-growth startups. We have high conviction that they are the right team with the right product at the right time to build a new champion in the sustainability space. In that sense, it was the only logical step to invest and support the founder team on their journey.

xdeck and Sunhat

Our goal is to not only serve as an investor but more importantly as a real sparring partner for our founders. To put in into the words of Lukas Vogt:

"xdeck ventures has been our loyal supporter since the early days, providing not only monetary support, but also their extensive knowledge in B2B sales and hiring. Our discussions are always on eye-level, balancing constructive criticism with encouragement, making their contributions extremely beneficial to us." - Lukas Vogt

We are excited to see what the future holds for Sunhat and are honored to be part of their success story. As investors, we will continue to support the team in their mission to help businesses achieve sustainability compliance through their innovative software solution.