I think it's fair to say we all know the importance of plants for us and the planet. I recently learned about this company who have taken that meaning it to a whole new level!
In February 2026, Dutch plant emporium Sprinklr announced it had paid back its investors.
That might sound like a standard milestone, the company returns capital, everyone moves on, but what happened before that is the interesting part.
You see, the investors didn't exit with a massive profit. They had previously converted their ordinary shares, which carried perpetual profit rights, into preference shares with limited returns and no voting power.
And the founders, Suzanne van Straaten and Liedewij Loorbach, also gave up their own profit rights entirely.
Sprinklr BV has just one shareholder, Stichting Sprinklr Impact (a foundation). So now the company is completely debt-free, self-owned, and by legal design, un-sellable. Steward-ownership.
To understand why a company would choose it, you need to understand what Sprinklr spent ten years building.
In 2016, Suzanne started a business in a market that didn't exist. Organic ornamental plants (houseplants, garden plants, bulbs, seeds, grown without pesticides or artificial fertiliser) were essentially unavailable in the Netherlands. Garden centres told her there was no customer demand. Consumers hadn't heard of the product. Growers weren't producing it.
"We made things incredibly difficult for ourselves with our ideals," she said. "In 2016 there was no market for organic, because nobody understood why it was important."
Building Sprinklr meant building both sides of the market simultaneously. They had to find growers willing to switch to organic methods, eventually partnering with large-scale grower Kwekerij Verhoeven. Educating consumers came next, often riding awareness waves created by Greenpeace reports and Dutch TV programmes investigating pesticides in garden plants. And running e-commerce for a product category that had no template: no pricing conventions, no established supply chain, no playbook.
Bob Leenders, an consultant in the world of organic farming, put it plainly: "Sprinklr was the first major player to make organic plants available to a broad public. The party that made it available to everyone didn't exist before."
Ten years later: nearly €5 million in revenue. 1.3 million organic plants shipped. A customer approval rating of 9.7 out of 10. The number of organic growers in the sector has doubled. Sprinklr has the largest selection of organic plants in the Netherlands.
The €345,000 raised from impact investors between 2017 and 2020, when the business's success was far from certain, is now fully repaid. Those investors plan to reinvest in other impact ventures.
At this point, most companies have options. Raise another round for expansion. Sell to a strategic buyer who can scale the model. List on a stock exchange. Any of these would reward the founders financially for a decade of difficult work building a market from nothing.
The steward-ownership structure removes all of those options. Not by accident, by design.
Steward-ownership separates two things that traditional corporate structures bundle together: economic rights and voting rights. In a conventional company, shareholders vote in proportion to their economic stake. This creates an exit incentive, if the right price appears, the fiduciary logic says take it. Companies get acquired. Missions drift. The organic plant company ends up becoming a tiny part of a conventional horticultural conglomerate focused on quarterly returns through toxic pesticides.
Steward-ownership breaks this logic. Voting rights stay with people actively working in, or overseeing the business, aka the stewards. Those rights cannot be sold or inherited. The foundation holds the shares, and profits are either reinvested in the mission or donated to aligned causes. There's no mechanism for an acquirer to obtain control, because there's nothing to buy that could grant control.
This sounds like a sacrifice. In the conventional framing, Suzanne and Liedewij gave up the financial upside of a decade's work. Except that framing assumes the goal was the financial upside.
If, however, the goal was actually to create an organic plant market that would continue to exist regardless of who ran the company, then the steward-ownership choice isn't a sacrifice at all.
It's the only logical path, and major milestone of the project. From this point forward, all profit goes back into advancing the mission, which is fully protected from greed driven externalities.
This isn't a new concept. Robert Bosch transferred his company to foundation ownership in the early 20th century to ensure it would serve employees, society, and the environment after his death. Carl Zeiss did it in 1889. Both the Bosch Foundation and the Carl Zeiss Foundation are still in operation today.
Denmark currently has approximately 1,000 steward-owned companies, including Carlsberg, Novo Nordisk, and AP Moller Maersk, which combined represent around 60% of the Danish stock market's value.
Patagonia completed a similar transition in 2022.
In this company, Sprinklr doesn’t seem radical, however, The Purpose Foundation, a German organisation that coined the term "steward-ownership" in 2017, estimates there are just a few thousand companies operating this way globally.
I have a lot of love for this kind of commitment. Building a market that didn't exist, staying in it through ten years of difficulty, paying back investors, and structurally protecting the mission from future owners who might not share the conviction. Can you imagine what it would be like if we all did that?
In February 2026, Dutch plant emporium Sprinklr announced it had paid back its investors.
That might sound like a standard milestone, the company returns capital, everyone moves on, but what happened before that is the interesting part.
You see, the investors didn't exit with a massive profit. They had previously converted their ordinary shares, which carried perpetual profit rights, into preference shares with limited returns and no voting power.
And the founders, Suzanne van Straaten and Liedewij Loorbach, also gave up their own profit rights entirely.
Sprinklr BV has just one shareholder, Stichting Sprinklr Impact (a foundation). So now the company is completely debt-free, self-owned, and by legal design, un-sellable. Steward-ownership.
To understand why a company would choose it, you need to understand what Sprinklr spent ten years building.
In 2016, Suzanne started a business in a market that didn't exist. Organic ornamental plants (houseplants, garden plants, bulbs, seeds, grown without pesticides or artificial fertiliser) were essentially unavailable in the Netherlands. Garden centres told her there was no customer demand. Consumers hadn't heard of the product. Growers weren't producing it.
"We made things incredibly difficult for ourselves with our ideals," she said. "In 2016 there was no market for organic, because nobody understood why it was important."
Building Sprinklr meant building both sides of the market simultaneously. They had to find growers willing to switch to organic methods, eventually partnering with large-scale grower Kwekerij Verhoeven. Educating consumers came next, often riding awareness waves created by Greenpeace reports and Dutch TV programmes investigating pesticides in garden plants. And running e-commerce for a product category that had no template: no pricing conventions, no established supply chain, no playbook.
Bob Leenders, an consultant in the world of organic farming, put it plainly: "Sprinklr was the first major player to make organic plants available to a broad public. The party that made it available to everyone didn't exist before."
Ten years later: nearly €5 million in revenue. 1.3 million organic plants shipped. A customer approval rating of 9.7 out of 10. The number of organic growers in the sector has doubled. Sprinklr has the largest selection of organic plants in the Netherlands.
The €345,000 raised from impact investors between 2017 and 2020, when the business's success was far from certain, is now fully repaid. Those investors plan to reinvest in other impact ventures.
At this point, most companies have options. Raise another round for expansion. Sell to a strategic buyer who can scale the model. List on a stock exchange. Any of these would reward the founders financially for a decade of difficult work building a market from nothing.
The steward-ownership structure removes all of those options. Not by accident, by design.
Steward-ownership separates two things that traditional corporate structures bundle together: economic rights and voting rights. In a conventional company, shareholders vote in proportion to their economic stake. This creates an exit incentive, if the right price appears, the fiduciary logic says take it. Companies get acquired. Missions drift. The organic plant company ends up becoming a tiny part of a conventional horticultural conglomerate focused on quarterly returns through toxic pesticides.
Steward-ownership breaks this logic. Voting rights stay with people actively working in, or overseeing the business, aka the stewards. Those rights cannot be sold or inherited. The foundation holds the shares, and profits are either reinvested in the mission or donated to aligned causes. There's no mechanism for an acquirer to obtain control, because there's nothing to buy that could grant control.
This sounds like a sacrifice. In the conventional framing, Suzanne and Liedewij gave up the financial upside of a decade's work. Except that framing assumes the goal was the financial upside.
If, however, the goal was actually to create an organic plant market that would continue to exist regardless of who ran the company, then the steward-ownership choice isn't a sacrifice at all.
It's the only logical path, and major milestone of the project. From this point forward, all profit goes back into advancing the mission, which is fully protected from greed driven externalities.
This isn't a new concept. Robert Bosch transferred his company to foundation ownership in the early 20th century to ensure it would serve employees, society, and the environment after his death. Carl Zeiss did it in 1889. Both the Bosch Foundation and the Carl Zeiss Foundation are still in operation today.
Denmark currently has approximately 1,000 steward-owned companies, including Carlsberg, Novo Nordisk, and AP Moller Maersk, which combined represent around 60% of the Danish stock market's value.
Patagonia completed a similar transition in 2022.
In this company, Sprinklr doesn’t seem radical, however, The Purpose Foundation, a German organisation that coined the term "steward-ownership" in 2017, estimates there are just a few thousand companies operating this way globally.
I have a lot of love for this kind of commitment. Building a market that didn't exist, staying in it through ten years of difficulty, paying back investors, and structurally protecting the mission from future owners who might not share the conviction. Can you imagine what it would be like if we all did that?