Mission-driven organizations need fundamentally different software

The conversation that started it all

We're a new software cooperative with a simple mission: help organizations building alternatives to extractive capitalism. So we reached out to B Corps in our network to ask: where does technology hold you back?

We expected to hear about typical scaling challenges: maybe some technical debt, hiring struggles, the usual growing pains everyone deals with.

But what we heard was something else entirely.

"We're spending more time proving our impact than creating it"

This hit hard because it was such a frequent topic.

The B Corp certification is totally voluntary but a notoriously comprehensive gauntlet to go through, requiring stakeholder impact metrics, financial data, audit trails, and reports across HR, environmental, supply chain, and governance areas.

The companies we heard from spent 3-8 weeks if not longer just collecting data from multiple systems, and most scrape by with a bare minimum of 80-90 points out of 250 possible points. Improving those scores every three years during recertificaion is no easy feat as it requires concerted effort from the entire company.

The people behind these assessments are the life and soul of the work. Behind every B Corp certification is usually one person—either a passionate champion or someone who got "voluntold" to be the single point of accountability. They're suddenly navigating unfamiliar carbon accounting software, chasing down invoices and APIs, corralling data across departments, all while maintaining their regular job responsibilities.

And the software landscape they're dealing with?

• Tools that assume top-down decision making when you operate collaboratively
• Assessment platforms that don't always fit reality — one European winery told us the B Corp questions "had little to do with" their actual operations, and most of their efforts weren't officially recognized
• "Informational chaos" from trying to wrangle data that lives in completely different systems

..and most are still defaulting to spreadsheets for all this!

The story that made us realize how broken this really is

The most surprising story came from a Polish private equity fund (yes, a certified B Corp PE firm) that needed a carbon calculator. They looked at the market and found…nothing that worked.

The market gave them two choices: enterprise software at $50K+ annually (built for Fortune 500s with dedicated IT teams) or basic tools that don't care for the complexity of your operations.

So the PE firm did what any resourceful team would do: they built their own carbon calculator and shared it with all their portfolio companies as well.

But the thing is, they're not engineers! They're a finance shop. They shouldn't have to build a calculator, but they did.

In their words,

"There's a lack, poor quality, or high cost of tools enabling sustainable transformation, particularly for medium-sized and smaller companies. Without accurately measuring emissions and identifying their main sources, it is nearly impossible to set reduction targets and track progress."

A finance team had to become software developers because a billion-dollar market for ESG software and carbon accounting couldn't serve their needs.

If that doesn't show a real need, we don't know what does.

The questions we think every B Corp leader should be asking

After all these conversations, we keep coming back to two things:

1. Do you really know what's in the software you're buying? Vendor demos during cert crunch time aren't exactly ideal for due diligence.
2. What happens when solutions on the market just don't fit your reality? Most mission-driven orgs don't have tech teams to build alternatives.

The companies we talked to are voluntarily putting themselves through comprehensive assessments because it's the right thing to do. They're balancing profit with purpose, managing complex stakeholder relationships, measuring impact beyond financial returns.

Software should make their life easier, not harder.

In a world where nations are abandoning climate pledges instead of doubling down on them, we need these organizations to succeed. They're building the alternatives to extractive capitalism we desperately need.

And honestly? They deserve better tools.

What we're exploring

We're not rushing to build another carbon calculator.

We're here to build custom software for organizations that actually need it: to serve their mission instead of distract from it.

For example, there's the governance challenge we kept hearing about. B Corps often restructure dramatically as part of their commitments: one financial services company (not the PE firm) went from cooperative to employee-owned, eliminating sales quotas entirely. Another embedded ESG values directly into their corporate statute, making sustainability considerations legally binding.

That's why we're working on Plaits: an app we're developing that helps you visualize the impact of decisions and consult affected stakeholders. Perfect for B Corps with legally binding sustainability considerations who want to "push the level of commitment as far as possible" without the slowdown that can sometimes cripple progress.

An open invitation

Mission-driven organizations operate differently and need fundamentally different software.

We learned that this software often doesn't exist despite a seemingly huge market, and some incredible impact-driven companies have had to create tools from scratch. How many other organizations are out there that need software but don't have it, or don't realize how much more software could help them?

We want to build this software. With you.

If you're running a mission-driven organization and wrestling with software that doesn't get what you're trying to do, we'd love to chat: free of charge and under NDA. We're not here to sell you anything, but to understand your specific challenges and see if there's a way we can help. Many founders we chat to find it cathartic end up talking to us for ages.

We're here to change the way software looks like for companies building alternative business, and we'd love to meet you.