By Xavier Lazarus, Managing Partner & Co-founder, Elaia
2023 has seen us continue to build on our sustainable habits from 2022 and push further in what new approaches we can adopt. We continue to focus on ESG not only within our own operations but also in the star- tups we engage with. Our aim remains to be a responsible player in the ecosystem, consistently adopting good practices and learning from other examples.
Being a responsible investor with values has been at the heart of what we do at Elaia since our founding over 20 years ago. Every member of our team abides by the key values we set out across our investment and transverse teams — working collectively for a common ambition: the success of our entrepreneurs. This includes giving back to the entrepreneur community from which we are lucky to find our Elaia Family. From our endowment fund to our open office hours and Ask Me Anything sessions with students and underprivileged communities across Europe, we are committed to consistently being an active participant in this vibrant community.
As we continue to see the proliferation of AI and GenAI across our industry, the race for this new technology is not without its impact across all facets of ESG. First, the challenges of AI adoption have been widely highlighted by government leaders, media, and technology leaders. From replacing jobs, to generating hallucinations, biases or fake news, there are clear risks in adopting AI at a mass scale without thoughtful policies. In the EU, privacy and governance of data used by LLMs has been a recurring subject, with the EU Data Act considering how best to protect personal data while encouraging innovation.
Second, it is increasingly understood that LLMs will become the central point of the renewed software paradigm, whether as a new interaction system with end users, a revolutionary machine-based application development capacity, or a limitless data based reasoning system. Consequently, the energy needed to reach this usage at scale and the associated heavy environmental cost will become an important side effect of the booming development of the AI sector.
As responsible investors, we are conscious of these competing priorities when evaluating our potential investments; we also believe that there is a massive investment opportunity to sustain AI technologies which are more frugal in energy cost or will help reduce the carbon footprint of LLM usage. This past year, we’ve backed a variety of companies that are looking to reduce AI energy consumption in the long run or implementing responsible environmental practices around LLM training and usage. At Elaia, we are conscious of these di- chotomies at play in investing in AI and we keep them in mind when deciding where to invest. We continue to look for founders that are pushing the edge of tech and deep tech innovation while considering sustainability so that we in turn can be responsible investors and partners to our startups.
This report aims to offer deeper insights into our ongoing ESG efforts and our commitment to upholding values of excellence.
To read our full 2023 Sustainability Report, click here.
