Sustainability

Building sustainability and driving social impact

At Aiven, we want to be responsible and do the right thing in every aspect of our business, and that necessarily involves addressing the parts of our operations that might contribute to climate change.

We know that the environmental footprint of innovative data technologies is significant, both for us and for our customers. While cloud platforms are more energy efficient than non-cloud implementations, we still want – and need – to minimize our own carbon footprint, and our customers’.

But that’s not enough in itself. We believe our responsibility to sustainability initiatives – and how we can help end climate change – goes much further than that.

It’s not only about reducing our environmental footprint. It’s about building a diverse and inclusive workforce that is committed to driving change. It’s about democratizing access to technology, so new solutions can be created. It’s about supporting other initiatives that align with these values.

It’s about contributing to the creation of a society that has openness and change at its heart.

Vision and objectives

A sustainable vision for the future

At Aiven, we want to challenge ourselves to define what being a socially and environmentally responsible company means, and translate that definition into tangible actions and improvements.

We seek to align our social and environmental efforts with our business objectives and key initiatives, and develop both quantitative and qualitative metrics to measure and report on our progress.

To achieve this, our sustainability program is working in three interlinked threads: Climate, Social Impact, and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

By weaving these threads together, we aim to take an active role in increasing inclusivity in the tech industry in order to generate a more sustainable and socially conscious world.

Climate

Map and minimize Aiven’s own environmental footprint, and help our customers and other organizations in reach their environmental sustainability goals

Social impact

Support Aiven employees in working for meaningful, value-champion causes, and democratize access to new technologies and ways of utilizing data

DEI

Build an inclusive workplace where people thrive as their authentic selves, and contribute towards making the technology industry more diverse

Sustainability

Climate track

Aiven wants to map and minimize Aiven’s own environmental footprint, but our ambition is not limited to that. We want to go much further.

Our first steps are to map out and minimize our own environmental footprint – collecting baseline data for Aiven’s CO2 emissions and tracking the share of renewable energy use so we can set targets and minimize our environmental impact. But we recognize this is only half the solution.

We also want to assist our customers and other organizations reach their environmental sustainability goals by helping them understand the environmental impact of their use of Aiven services, and highlighting the ways that they can reduce their environmental footprint (e.g. through compensation, optimizing energy sources by cloud vendor / region, reducing overconsumption)

Three different leafy plants represent Aiven's DEI initiative

Diversity, equity, inclusion

Deeper into DEI

It’s widely acknowledged that the tech industry can do a lot better when building diverse and inclusive environments – at Aiven, we believe the work to achieve this begins at home, and that’s why we’re strongly committed to building a more diverse and inclusive company.

We want our culture to reflect our open source roots: it is our responsibility to make Aiven accessible and open to everyone, and to make our workforce reflect the whole developer community.

By 2025, we want the diversity of Aiven’s workforce to be aligned with industry benchmarks in the markets where we are present. We build solid people processes that support the equitable treatment of all employees, and we’re focusing on shaping up our internal DEI efforts to make sure we live up to our principles and set an inspiring example.

Recent activities

Setting up foundational structures such as a DEI strategy and DEI council to make sure DEI is embedded in everything we do at Aiven
Focusing on shaping our hiring process and upskilling our hiring managers to make sure we are using a wide scope of actions that make us successful in hiring diverse talent
Building internal affinity communities to make sure we can provide a meaningful experience for and platform for underrepresented groups working at Aiven

Social impact

Supporting change

Our Social Impact track has two primary goals centered around the democratization of technology, and supporting causes aligned with our values.

First, we want to democratize access to new technologies and ways of utilizing data so more people can contribute to the development of the society and economy. Whether it’s helping smaller companies compete against established corporations, or helping non-profits build services with a purpose, we want to lower the barrier of entry to the market to allow more people to participate in the economy.

Initiatives such as our Cluster startup program and Open Source Program Office (OSPO) are examples of the first steps we’ve taken to achieve this goal.

Our second goal is achieved by supporting Aiven employees in working for causes that they find meaningful and that represent our own values. One way we do this is by actively supporting our employees’ contributions to open source projects through our Plankton program. We also offer our employees paid leave for volunteering and learning, and regularly donate to charities of their choice.

We consider all these aspects of our operations an essential part of our sustainability initiative, and we’re committed to further developing these actions.

Recent activities: