Platform.sh now a Certified B Corp™, continues to aim for the stars

Platform.sh was built on a set of core principles: positive impact, caring for others, fairness, aiming for the stars. Since 2015, our founders have followed their own true north, creating a cloud application platform and technologies that would make developers’ daily lives easier. Like most for-profit businesses, the leadership team sought marketplace differentiation. Revenue growth. Continuous innovation. But they wanted something more. They realized a tech scale-up could be a force for the greater good.

In 2020, we began to put sustainability front and center, helping customers to reduce their carbon footprints. After a multiyear journey, today we’re elated to announce that Platform.sh, including Upsun and Blackfire, is now officially a Certified B Corporation™ (B Corp™)—meeting B Lab™’s high standards of social and environmental impact, accountability, and transparency. We're so proud to join a global community of for-profit companies committed to using business as that force for good.

Why B Corp Certification really matters

From our inception, innovation and continuous improvement have been the heartbeat of our products and our culture. To guide our direction and decision-making, we’ve sought customer and stakeholder ideas and feedback: requests for new product features, support for compliance with emerging regulations, ESG standards.

All of this input and more—including B Corp alignment with our core values of trust, transparency, sustainability, and just being good global citizens—made B Corp Certification a logical (and exciting) next step in our organization’s growth. In May 2022, after gaining agreement from our board of directors, we began to pursue certification.

“When we undertook this journey, we knew full well it would require an investment in terms of our staff’s bandwidth; it would be demanding; and we’d need to make some changes,” says Platform.sh VP Data Protection and Compliance Joey Stanford. “But B Corp Certification aligns with our mission, our vision, and our company culture. We decided it mattered to our business—enhancing credibility, solidifying differentiation, continuing to build trust, and reinforcing what we think is the soul of the company.”

What we learned in the process

Over the course of the next two years, as we moved through the rigorous B Corp audit process, our team had the opportunity to dig deep, looking at our practices and processes, our financials, and our culture. Nothing was sacred. We had moments of epiphany and pride, retrospection, introspection, identified where we had room to grow, to refine, and to celebrate how far we’d come at this stage in our maturity.

“The audit provided us with validation,” Stanford says. “Have we been doing the right things? What can we improve upon? This microscope, scrutinizing at a molecular level, forced us to look at some things that we hadn’t focused on or never really thought about before.”

Because Platform.sh has always been a highly flexible remote organization, throughout the B Corp Certification process, our People Team identified several gaps in policies that no one had considered previously. The audit opened the opportunity to thoughtfully develop new policies. And—with speed and agility—document them in our employee handbook.

Leveraging B Corp analytical tools, the team could assess living wages, PTO, and benefits across geographies. While we scored high in areas like career mobility, financial security, healthcare/wellness benefits, low turnover, and remote lifestyle, the team was able to make refinements to further improve in these categories. The deep and broad assessment validated that, despite being a remote company, we’ve continued to build community among staff and offer benefits comparable to other B Corp Certified businesses.

Precursor to B Corp Certification: charting a course for the future

Cloud application platforms are powered by data centers. These centers require massive amounts of energy to power servers, cooling systems, and other infrastructure.

As a cloud application platform provider, the Platform.sh team recognized we could maximize energy efficiencies for customers. Offer user-selected, greener hosting options based on Energy Grid Carbon Intensity information available for regional hyperscale providers. And continue to develop innovative technologies that help customers make greener deployment choices to reduce their cloud carbon footprints.

Carbon footprint transparency

Since 2020, Platform.sh has engaged certified, third-party auditor Greenly to measure and publish our carbon footprint data, a commitment we’ve exercised—and will continue to exercise—annually. A Greenly-performed density study determined how efficiently Platform.sh uses CPUs in the cloud compared to a standard deployment (AWS EC2). Platform.sh density was, on average, 12x more dense for our grid offering, meaning 12x less electricity was used to run an equivalent workload.⁷ Less electricity used by the data center ultimately lowers CO₂ emissions.

In May of this year, we sent each of our customers their first annual carbon footprint reports to help them better understand their environmental impact. The reports provide results of their applications’ CO₂eq emissions on Platform.sh, with data calculated using the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol and quantified by Greenly.

“It's a step toward making informed decisions that align with sustainability goals, whether for internal benchmarking or for reporting in compliance with environmental, social, and governance criteria,” Plais explains.

As part of our commitment to providing customers with the most transparent, up-to-date carbon intensities for our public regions, Platform.sh uses annual carbon intensities from Electricity Maps. With this data, customers can make more informed decisions about greener project deployment. By changing the deployment location from a high-carbon grid to a low-carbon grid, customers can reduce their CO₂eq emissions by up to 15x.⁸

The Platform.sh open Regions API exposes additional information in our console when customers create new projects, enabling them to view the underlying infrastructure provider, data center location, and carbon intensity in CO₂eq/kWh. Carbon intensities are calculated based on the methodology outlined in the IPCC 2014 Fifth Assessment Report. Customers can choose the region with the lowest carbon intensity or a cloud provider committed to reducing its environmental footprint.

Commitment to sustainability

In June 2024, both independent rating agencies EcoVadis and Greenly awarded Platform.sh gold medals, ranking us among the top 5% of all companies in all industries the agencies assess. Greenly reported that Platform.sh achieved a 6% reduction in our 2023 CO₂eqemissions audit compared to 2022.

To further support environmentally conscious developers and organizations striving to improve their carbon footprints, Platform.sh introduced a greener-region discount for our Upsun users. A tech industry first. When users choose to deploy to a data center in one of six incentive-eligible greener regions, they receive a 3% discount on their Upsun resource usage.

Platform.sh is a participant in both the Paris Agreement and the United Nations Global Compact. In 2022, we officially revised our bylaws to include generating a positive and significant social, societal, and environmental impact as a core operating principle.

Looking ahead, with all eyes on continuous improvement

Customers, investors, staff, and prospective employees want to do business with and seek organizations whose values align with their own. For us and those we interact with, that translates into making a difference in the broader context of the world.

The entire Platform.sh team remains humbled to find ourselves among the ranks of socially conscious B Corp Certified businesses—including trailblazers like Ben & Jerry’s, Dr. Bronner’s, Patagonia, South Mountain Company, Trillium Asset Management, and WakaWaka—driven by a common purpose.