2023-05-25 13:17:38
Dhe tech start-up Sunhat claims to have raised two million euros in a seed round. In early 2022, the company started holding investor talks, says Lukas Vogt, co-founder and CEO of Sunhat. In a preliminary round, it initially received around one million euros, and now the second has followed.
The financing is led by Vogt’s previous employer Capnamic Ventures – an early-stage venture capital investor based in Cologne, Berlin and Munich. In addition, xdeck Ventures from Cologne, the corporate VC WEPA Ventures and a number of business angels are invested.
“Above all, we wanted to have people who know us and want to work with us,” says Vogt. Sunhat has developed software that helps companies to answer questionnaires on sustainability goals faster and more accurately.
According to Vogt, many companies have developed sustainability strategies in recent years that include transparent supply chains. In this context, it is the suppliers in particular who must therefore disclose their own sustainability data.
To do this, they receive comprehensive questionnaires from their customers, which, among other things, record CO₂ emissions. The problem: suppliers in the middle of a supply chain in particular usually have to fill out a whole series of such questionnaires – and that ties up resources in the long term.
Software against greenwashing
“We asked around in the companies and many of us reflected that they had to spend an enormous amount of time for this,” says Vogt. The task of sustainability teams in the company is actually different – namely the development of new concepts.
“In addition, the sustainability strategies of companies are very individual,” says Vogt. “But the questionnaires are generic. And it’s also quite complicated.” The software helps by reading out the current questionnaire and looking for suitable answers from previous questionnaires that have already been answered.
“In this way, around 50 percent of the questions can be answered directly in advance,” says Vogt. The longer companies use the software, the more questions can tend to be answered with its help.
Ali Kamalizade, Lukas Vogt and Alexander Behr (from left) founded the Cologne tech start-up Sunhat together
Source: Sunhat
However, the software also wants to support more than just saving time. Vogt explains that employees in companies are often overwhelmed with the questionnaires. “On the one hand, this is because the questions are complicated and, on the other hand, because they require knowledge from a wide variety of processes,” says Vogt.
That’s why the founders of Sunhat started with setting up a database of questions and developing support for it. “We also want to prevent greenwashing in this way,” says Vogt.
If questions are answered incorrectly – even unintentionally – this is not only bad for the environment, but ultimately also for the company, which potentially commits a breach of contract.
The founders Lukas Vogt and Ali Kamalizade developed the idea because they themselves had to deal with various questionnaires. “We realized pretty quickly that we wanted to find a solution for this,” says Vogt. They then brought in Alexander Behr to found the company.
“What connects us all is that we want to work on an effective vision,” says Vogt. Even if filling out the questionnaires is a chore, he still finds the procedure “absolutely necessary”, as he says. That’s why it was important to him and his co-founders to find a solution that would at least simplify the process.
As of August 29, 2022, Sunhat has its first paying customer. The first million from the pre-seed round went into building the software, while Sunhat now wants to invest the second million in expanding the technology and in marketing, among other things. “We’ve flown under the radar a bit so far and now we want to go out and show who we are,” says Vogt. To this end, the company is now increasingly hiring employees outside of the tech area.
Talents are looking for meaningful jobs
Sunhat is in the same situation as other companies: In times of a shortage of skilled workers, it is not easy to find new people, says Vogt. Recruiting is going pretty well at the moment. “We get an unbelievable number of applications,” says Vogt.
He believes that could also be due to the appeal of climate activist Luisa Neubauer. At the online marketing conference OMR in May, she called on employees from the marketing industry in particular to quit their jobs so that they would no longer contribute to the greenwashing of large corporations. If you can, you should instead look for a job that will help tackle the problem.
“What do we do with our lifetime and our energy, where do we go eight hours a day? That’s the big question we all have to ask ourselves this decade,” the activist said, according to t3n.de.
In the end, that was what drove the founders, says Vogt. With Sunhat, the three want to use their strengths and knowledge to do something meaningful. The founding was obvious. “After all, I can’t just become a carpenter to build sustainable furniture,” says Vogt.
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