Who We Are
The Institute for Ethical Venture Capital (Ethics VC) is a nonprofit research and policy organization that investigates how venture capital and private equity firms, portfolio companies, founders, and institutional investors – including university endowments, pension funds, investment managers, and family offices – become entangled in systems that cause, enable, or profit from violations of international humanitarian law and human rights.
We produce institutional-grade risk assessments for pension trustees, endowments, family offices, investment managers, and LP governance bodies — translating opaque private-market structures into documented, evidence-based findings that fiduciaries and investors can act on.
How We Came to Exist
Ethics VC was founded in response to a specific and urgent failure of institutional visibility: the role of U.S. venture capital and, by association, institutions funded by civilian money, in financing crimes against humanity through surveillance systems, autonomous weapons, and technology deployed against Palestinians. What began as an effort to document complicity in the genocide of Palestinians became the foundation for something broader — a rigorous, universal research framework applicable to any venture-backed system of harm, anywhere in the world.
That origin matters. It means our methodology was forged under genuine urgency, tested in one of the world’s most contested investment environments, and built to withstand scrutiny. Our work started with documenting financial and institutional networks connected to the ongoing violence against Palestinians. U.S. venture capital accounts for a significant share of investment in Israeli technology, especially in high-risk sectors such as cybersecurity, autonomous systems, lethal weapon technologies, and dual-use AI. Firms with documented exposure to the ongoing violence against Palestinians remain a core area of our research, and we name it directly. But the framework we developed applies universally — to any geography, any conflict, any institutional portfolio.
What Makes Us Different
ESG frameworks have expanded institutional awareness of environmental and social risk, but they were not designed to assess exposure to crimes against humanity. Ethics VC fills that gap.
We apply a universal, evidence-based assessment framework to venture capital and private equity firms regardless of geography, sector, or political context. Our six-principle criteria — grounded in international humanitarian law and US regulatory standards, covering apartheid, genocide, war crimes, weapons development, complicity, and the economies that sustain crimes against humanity — provide a structured, operationally rigorous basis for identifying human rights exposure across institutional portfolios.
Our findings draw on primary-source documentation, including SEC filings, earnings disclosures, contract records, and verified financial data, and are evaluated against internationally recognized standards, including ERISA, the Uniform Prudent Investor Act, and UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.
Core outputs include an upcoming database tracking VC firm and portfolio company exposure, flagship research reports, and investor toolkits — all documented, evidence-based, and structured in the language of fiduciary decision-making.
We document exposure, quantify risk, and equip fiduciaries to make informed decisions.
Why It Matters to Institutions
Institutional portfolios increasingly allocate more than 40% of assets to private equity and venture capital — often without meaningful visibility into the underlying companies, their counterparties, or their human rights impacts. That visibility gap is not only an ethical problem. It is a legal and financial one.
Fiduciaries who cannot document the human rights profile of their private-market holdings face growing exposure: reputational risk from public disclosure, legal risk from beneficiary litigation, and portfolio risk from regulatory developments in sanctions, export controls, and international accountability frameworks.
Institutions cannot act on headlines. Investment committees, trustees, and compliance teams require documented findings, structured against recognized legal and governance standards, presented in the language of fiduciary decision-making. That is precisely what Ethics VC produces. We exist to close the gap between public concern and institutional action.
Our Mission
To document the human rights exposure embedded in venture capital portfolios and give institutional investors the evidence they need to understand, disclose, and move capital away from systems of harm.
What We Do
Research & Investigation
We conduct in-depth investigations tracing venture capital's links to defense, surveillance, and human rights abuses. Our reports are grounded in verified primary-source documentation and structured against our published assessment criteria.
Tools & Frameworks
We develop fiduciary toolkits, governance briefings, due diligence checklists, and policy frameworks that help institutional investors and trustees identify exposure and strengthen oversight practices.
Academic & Research Partnerships
We collaborate with universities, research centers, and independent researchers to expand transparency and deepen the evidentiary basis of accountability research.
Platform Development
We are building transparency infrastructure, including a data platform, accountability dashboard, and ethical assessment framework, to support ongoing institutional due diligence.
A Note on Independence
Ethics VC’s research findings are determined solely by our published methodology and primary-source evidence. No funder, partner, or third party, directs, reviews, or approves our conclusions before publication. Our six-principle assessment framework is applied universally and consistently, regardless of the geography, identity, or political context of the subject firm. We do not prescribe investment outcomes. We document what the evidence shows and make that documentation available to the institutions that need it.