August 27, 2026 · In its newly published 2025 Sustainability Report, Gobi Partners outlines an ambitious roadmap for 2026/2027 focused on achieving regional autonomy with global consistency. Sustina is proud to be the strategic engine helping design the operating system for this transition.
Gobi Partners is an Asia-focused venture capital firm founded in 2002, with local teams across East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and neighboring growth markets.
As Gobi Partners’ sustainability reporting and advisory partner, Sustina led the data analysis across the firm’s portfolio and internal offices—covering overall ESG performance, carbon emissions, employee engagement, and current reporting practices—and advised on industry-standard reporting frameworks, providing actionable guidance toward closer alignment to leading ESG standards.
Following the comprehensive analysis across Gobi Partners’ portfolio and internal offices, Sustina Executive Director Anna Reyes officially joined Gobi Partners’ Sustainability Advisory Council to help refine the firm’s longer-term strategy.
Sustina will support this work by focusing on turning Gobi Partners’ regional autonomy goals into measurable realities:
- Decentralized execution anchored by centralized rigor: Designing frameworks that support regional offices in independently managing ESG due diligence and portfolio reviews without compromising data integrity.
- From policy to credibility markers: Bridging the critical gap between policy adoption and actual measurement, ensuring local offices have the tools to track real-world impact.
- Localized value creation: Tailoring sustainability scorecards to reflect the unique regulatory and economic realities of Greater China, Southeast Asia, and South Asia.
Insights on the process of working on this report
Gobi Partners is facing one of the most complex challenges in venture capital: scaling sustainability across diverse, multi-regional markets.
The difficulty is structural. Venture capital firms back startups at their earliest stages of growth—companies still building their product, their team, and their revenue. For most, sustainability reporting is not yet a function they have the capacity for.
In Gobi Partners’ portfolio, a large percentage of reporting companies are between pre-seed and pre-Series A, meaning most lack dedicated ESG or compliance staff. As the portfolio grows, new companies usually arrive without any sustainability baseline, resetting aggregate progress. Even among companies that do report, stated intention rarely converts into action—in one cycle, nearly three-quarters said they planned to develop a sustainability policy; two years later, fewer than a quarter had done so.
At the same time, external expectations are converging from multiple directions. Startups will face sustainability scrutiny at their next funding round. The institutional investors behind venture funds increasingly expect standardized, comparable data. Across all three of Gobi Partners’ operating jurisdictions—Greater Bay Area, Malaysia, and Pakistan—market authorities are phasing in mandatory sustainability disclosure requirements through 2027. For venture firms operating across these markets, the question is no longer whether to build this infrastructure, but how quickly and effectively.
Given these challenges, how does one equip local offices to execute ESG initiatives while maintaining rigorous, shared reporting standards?
Analyzing three years of longitudinal data across Gobi Partners’ ecosystem revealed a broader pattern for APAC venture capital: governance follows external accountability. Sustina saw rapid, measurable improvement in areas like data security and AI ethics—driven directly by enterprise clients and regional regulators demanding it. Conversely, voluntary ESG policies often stall across the industry without that same structural pressure.
The takeaway is clear: Policy without an accountability loop rarely produces measurable outcomes. Building the infrastructure that turns stated commitments into verifiable proof points is the exact challenge Gobi Partners’ new regional roadmap is designed to solve.
We believe the future of APAC venture capital relies on ecosystems that are coherent at the center but adaptive on the ground. As Gobi Partners enters this next phase of its sustainability journey, Sustina is committed to helping build the infrastructure that makes regional autonomy not just an aspiration, but an operational reality.
Read the full Gobi Partners 2025 Sustainability Report here.
Note: Carlo Chen-Delantar is the Head of Sustainability at Gobi Partners and a board member of Sustina.
