Responsibly secures $2m pre-seed investment round led by VC firm Flash Ventures

Responsibly, the supplier data platform for responsible supply chains, today announces a $2m pre-seed investment round led by venture capital firm Flash Ventures.

This investment will allow Responsibly to expand its team of engineers, data scientists, and the impact intelligence team, to accelerate the building of its flexible data feed and interpretation engines. The raise will also enable the Danish startup to soft-launch the first version of Responsibly, a service making sense of the world’s supplier data, empowering businesses to purchase responsibly and efficiently.

As customers on a global scale expect sustainability and purpose from their everyday lives, supply chains and providers have to adapt to the new ‘decade of purpose’.

Responsibly centralises and harmonises supplier data of more than 10,000 suppliers for pilot customers; producing the scorecards that are used to better inform sourcing decisions. This enables companies along the value chain to incorporate purpose and reduce their own negative impacts on the world.

The raise mobilises the Danish tech start-up to build the engines that will make sense of the world’s wide array of supplier data, and transform that into something that can be used for decision making. Responsibly’s goal is to give corporate purchasers the tools to to put social and environmental “impact” alongside price on the supplier scorecard.

“If we can make it as easy for purchasers to evaluate how their suppliers compare on a planetary agenda, as it is to compare them on price, then we think we can unlock the huge force for change that’s sitting in the world’s procurement departments,” said Responsibly’s Co Founder and CEO Thomas Buch Andersson.

The investment round is backed by Flash Ventures’ partner Johann Nordhus Westarp, serial entrepreneur and investor Ferry Heilemann, angel investor Michael Wax, Founder and CEO of Planetly Benedikt Franke.

Johann Nordhus Westarp, Founding Partner at Flash Ventures says: “Whilst we are huge believers in both Thomas and Jacob, it’s the wider team behind Responsibly that is also very strong, together their ability to execute on their vision makes this something of an easy decision. The timing is perfect, and companies will fundamentally change the way they procure in the next couple of years. Price- or value-driven procurement will give way to impact-driven procurement. Companies are acting somewhat blindly today, treading-water to solve the ‘problem of the day’. Responsibly helps them finally get visibility into their procurement footprints and make forward thinking decisions for all the right reasons.”

“Our vision of making every purchase in the world responsible is great but ambitious, being able to announce a $2m pre-seed with some incredible investors is a boost to kickstart that journey,” adds Buch Andersson. “The first problem to solve is transparency. Right now, there are thousands of information sources, moreover, that information is too costly to access and interpret, which means it’s rarely fully leveraged in sourcing decisions. The funding enables us to expand our top-end engineering team and build the engines and intelligence that can read, interpret, and translate information across sources into intuitive scorecards, so we can pilot the product with our very exciting pilot customers.”