Startup Of The Week

Startup Of The Week: Valueco

ValueCo aims to bridge the gap between sustainability and financial performance by providing companies and investors with a view of the market’s perception of corporate sustainability. Customers include LMVH, Thales, ABM Amro and Bank of America.

The French startup won a Tech For Change award at VivaTech 2025, which took place in Paris June 11-14. The competition highlights startups using technology to drive real impact on climate, inclusion and sustainability. In May Valueco won second prize in the Challenge Innovéa organized by the Groupe Caisse des Dépôts, an investment arm of the French state.

“While public companies are used to driving their strategy based on their stock price they don’t have an aggregated view of the market value of their sustainability efforts,” says Mariem Mhadhbi, a trained engineer who studied finance and worked for more than 13 years in financial markets, starting with credit structuring at ING in New York and equity derivatives in Brussels, before moving on to the sale of structured products and  then to institutional consulting. “Our goal is to identify what is driving investors when it comes to sustainability and establish explicit pricing of the risk and the opportunity.”

When companies report on sustainability investors like Blackrock and Fidelity use internal scoring systems. “Everyone has their own internal opinion, so no one knows what the market overall thinks about a company’s sustainability performance,” Mhadhbi said during an interview at Vivatech.

ValueCo aggregates and standardizes the opinions of over 47 asset managers, representing a portfolio exceeding $9 trillion, across more than 30,000 companies. The collected feedback – which is anonymized- includes not only the 10,000 they invested in but the 20,000 they passed on” due to issues with sustainability, she says.

This allows ValueCo to inform its corporate customers what investors think of them, what are the drivers of the investors’ opinions and to pinpoint where the issues are. “The problem today is you have information going from companies to investors, but you don’t have systematic feedback to the companies,” she says.  “ValueCo helps companies understand what investors want so they can drive their sustainability strategy accordingly.”

The asset managers volunteer the information to ValueCo in return for information on how their assessments compare to others as well as access to research from academic partners such as MIT, says Mhadhbi, who co-founded the company in 2022 with data scientist Mathieu Joubrel, the co-author of several books on sustainable finance.

ValueCo’s closest competitors are companies like Bloomberg that analyze companies’ overall performance and put a price on it.  ValueCo’s differentiator is “we don’t analyze companies, we specialize in aggregating what investors do specifically on sustainability,” she says.

The company has raised about €2 million to date, including a €1.5million funding round, led by 115K, the Venture Capital fund of La Banque Postale, with participation from Techstars and a group of private investors.

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About the author

Jennifer L. Schenker

Jennifer L. Schenker, an award-winning journalist, has been covering the global tech industry from Europe since 1985, working full-time, at various points in her career for the Wall Street Journal Europe, Time Magazine, International Herald Tribune, Red Herring and BusinessWeek. She is currently the editor-in-chief of The Innovator, an English-language global publication about the digital transformation of business. Jennifer was voted one of the 50 most inspiring women in technology in Europe in 2015 and 2016 and was named by Forbes Magazine in 2018 as one of the 30 women leaders disrupting tech in France. She has been a World Economic Forum Tech Pioneers judge for 20 years. She lives in Paris and has dual U.S. and French citizenship.