measured honestly.
reported transparently.

1. introduction

2025 was the year Venture CO Group grew up as an international organization — and the year our ESG program had to grow with it.

When we published our first ESG report in early 2025, we made a simple promise: we would treat sustainability the way we treat engineering — measure honestly, ship improvements, and report what actually happened, not what sounds good. This report is our first opportunity to be held to that standard. In it, you will find progress we are proud of: our renewable electricity transition is underway, our first 50 trees are in the ground, and our internal ESG dashboard moved from concept to pilot. You will also find honesty about where growth created new challenges — most visibly, an increase in travel-related emissions as we entered new markets. We explain how we are managing that, rather than hiding it.

As a small, remote-first group operating across IT, creative, media, and consulting disciplines, our absolute footprint remains modest. But we have never believed that “small” is an excuse for “unmeasured.” As we expand into the United States, Turkey, and Central Asia, the discipline we build now — proportionate, data-driven, and transparent — is what will keep our impact low and our accountability high at any scale.

Thank you for reading, and for holding us to our word.

— The Board of Venture CO Group, Budapest

2. about venture co group

Venture CO Group is a multidisciplinary business group headquartered in Budapest, Hungary, operating with a small core team and a remote-first working model. Our activities span:

• IT services — web development, hosting, cybersecurity, data science, and IT architecture consulting
• Marketing, PR, and creative services — brand, communications, and content production
• Motion picture and streaming — production and distribution-oriented media work
• Esports and community events — competitive gaming events and community programs
• Business and NGO consultation — strategy, operations, and organizational development
• SaaS products — including UnderForge, our evidence-based strength coaching application
• Grant advisory — supporting clients in accessing EU and national funding programs

A five-market international footprint. Our growth timeline reflects deliberate, staged expansion: entry into the United Kingdom in 2023, dedicated SaaS development from 2024, market entry into Uzbekistan in 2025, and expansion into the United States and Turkey in 2026, supported by strategic partnerships established in 2026. Fiscal year 2025 — the period covered by this report — was therefore a preparation and scaling year: consolidating our Central Asian entry while laying the operational and compliance groundwork for the US and Turkish markets.

Our structure remains lean by design. A compact core team, extended by a trusted network of specialists and partners, allows us to operate with a naturally low resource intensity — an advantage we treat as a baseline to protect, not a result to take credit for.

3. esg strategy

Our ESG strategy rests on four principles, unchanged in substance since our first report but sharpened by a year of practice:

• Materiality first. We focus on the issues where a digital-and-creative services group of our size genuinely moves the needle: the energy footprint of digital operations, business travel, data privacy and security, ethical business conduct, community education, and the wellbeing of a distributed team.
• Sector-specific action. Each business line carries its own ESG lens — energy-aware hosting and green software practices in IT; responsible messaging and accessibility in marketing; inclusive, community-positive formats in esports and media; ESG capability-building embedded in our consulting and grant advisory work.
• Integrated workflows. ESG is not a parallel process. Sustainability and ethics considerations are embedded in project intake, procurement, event planning, and product development — responsible choices are the default path, not an added review step.
• Data-first transparency. We report measured figures where we have them and clearly flagged estimates where we do not — and we say which is which.

Reporting framework orientation. As a small enterprise, we are not currently subject to mandatory EU sustainability reporting. Nevertheless, we orient our disclosures toward the VSME standard — the EU’s voluntary sustainability reporting standard for SMEs — and toward the proportionality logic of the broader CSRD framework. This prepares us for value-chain data requests from larger clients and positions us for a possible future external review.

4. environmental performance 2025

4.1 Progress against 2025 commitments

Renewable electricity transition — initiated. Contractual and tariff arrangements for renewable-sourced electricity were put in motion for our fixed-location consumption during the year. The transition is not yet complete — full coverage is targeted for the 2026–2027 roadmap period — but the shift is underway and irreversible by design.

Tree planting — first 50 trees planted (commitment completed). In 2025 we fulfilled our pledge to plant 50 trees per year, completing the first tranche through a verified planting partner. This is now a recurring annual commitment; the 2026 tranche is already scheduled.

Internal ESG dashboard — launched in pilot. The dashboard aggregates electricity consumption, travel activity, and community-reach data. The pilot exposed exactly the gaps it was meant to expose — inconsistent data granularity and manual entry bottlenecks — which directly shaped our 2026–2027 automation roadmap.

4.2 Carbon footprint

We estimate our 2025 carbon footprint at approximately 1 tonne of CO₂ per employee per year (estimate) — consistent with our 2024 baseline and well below the sector reference average of roughly 3.2 tonnes. This figure is an internal estimate based on electricity consumption, travel records, and standard emission factors; it has not been externally verified.

4.3 Energy and digital operations

Fixed-location electricity consumption remained low, on the order of our previously reported baseline of ~3,600 kWh per year (estimate), with roughly 80% of operations conducted remotely. We also maintained and extended our digital sobriety practices: lifecycle-conscious hardware procurement and extended device use, dark-data hygiene, efficiency-aware hosting configurations, streaming and video-delivery optimization, and lightweight, performance-optimized builds as a standard in our web development practice — lower page weight means lower energy use for every visitor, on every visit.

4.4 Waste and materials

Established practices continued throughout 2025: near paper-free administration, PET-free office operations, and selective waste collection at fixed locations. Esports and community events organized by the group applied waste-reduction requirements in venue and catering choices.

5. social performance 2025

5.1 Community reach and programs

In 2024 we reached more than 15,000 people through educational, community, and esports programs. For 2025 our stated target was to grow beyond that baseline — a target we met, expanding both the number of programs and their geographic spread. Our 2025 portfolio included:

• Digital skills and technology education — workshops and mentoring on web technologies, cybersecurity awareness, and data literacy for students, career-changers, and NGO staff.
• Esports and gaming community events — inclusive competitive events with explicit codes of conduct, designed as accessible entry points into digital culture.
• NGO capacity-building — pro bono and reduced-fee consulting, grant advisory support, and digital-transformation guidance for civil-society organizations.
• Health and performance education via UnderForge — evidence-based strength training and health-literacy content, extending our social impact into physical wellbeing.

5.2 Employee wellbeing

In 2025 we maintained and refined our wellbeing framework: wellness and coaching benefits for all core team members, flexible remote-first scheduling, a right-to-disconnect norm, and regular structured check-ins designed for a distributed team. As we onboard collaborators in new markets, these standards travel with us — they are conditions of how we work, not perks of where we work.

5.3 Diversity and inclusion

We reaffirmed our commitment to gender equality in pay, opportunity, and representation, applied across hiring, partner selection, and program design. In our events and media work we actively design for inclusive participation — a particular responsibility in esports, where anti-harassment codes of conduct are a non-negotiable condition of every event we run. Operating across Hungary, the UK, Uzbekistan, and — from 2026 — the US and Turkey means building a genuinely multicultural collaboration network; cross-cultural respect and local inclusion are explicit operating standards in each market.

6. governance

6.1 Ethics and compliance

Our Code of Ethics is published on our website and applies to every team member, contractor, and — through contractual flow-down — key partners. Annual ethics training was completed by the full core team in 2025, covering anti-corruption, conflicts of interest, fair competition, responsible marketing, and data-handling obligations. No material ethics incidents were recorded during the reporting period.

6.2 Transparency

We report voluntarily, on a fixed annual cycle, and we distinguish measured data from estimates throughout. Where a commitment is delayed or a metric moves in the wrong direction, we say so in the report — as we do in Section 4.2 of this one.

6.3 Risk management

Our framework operates across three core domains: data privacy (GDPR-aligned practices, extended in 2025 to cross-border considerations in new markets), client and talent retention, and environmental risk. Internal audits during the year covered data-handling practices and compliance controls. As part of US and Turkish market preparation, we conducted regulatory-landscape reviews so privacy, consumer-protection, and employment obligations are mapped before operations scale.

6.4 Supply-chain responsibility and modern slavery new in this report

With a five-market footprint comes value-chain responsibility. In 2025 we formalized two additions:

• Supplier and partner ESG screening. Key suppliers and long-term partners are assessed against baseline criteria covering labor practices, data security, and environmental conduct, with ESG expectations reflected in our contracting templates.
• Modern slavery position. Consistent with the expectations of the UK market, we maintain a statement on modern slavery and human trafficking: zero tolerance for forced, bonded, or child labor anywhere in our operations or supply chain — and we require the same commitment from suppliers.

7. kpi summary — fiscal year 2025

All quantitative environmental figures in this report are internal estimates based on consumption records, travel data, and standard emission factors, and have not been subject to external assurance.

8. roadmap 2026–2027

Our forward commitments are deliberately few, specific, and checkable:

We will report against each of these items, explicitly, in our next annual report.

9. conclusion

The measure of an ESG program is not the elegance of its commitments but what happens to them twelve months later. Of the commitments we made for 2025, the renewable transition is underway, the first 50 trees are planted, the dashboard is live in pilot, and our community reach grew past its baseline. Where expansion increased our travel footprint, we have named it and put policy behind reducing it.

A small company measuring honestly is worth more than a large one reporting beautifully.

Venture CO Group enters 2026 as a five-market organization with the same conviction it had as a three-person Budapest team. We intend to keep proving it — one verifiable commitment at a time.