We got this project because Rashmi was honest in her application. She didn’t just list our skills — she mentioned that we genuinely care about animals. Not as activists, not as vegans, but as people who simply don’t want to see them hurt. That sincerity is what won us the work. Six years later, we’re still on the project.
What Cruelty Free Investing Does
Cruelty Free Investing is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization based in Austin, Texas, founded by Dave Wasser and Alicia Robb, Ph.D. Their mission is straightforward and ambitious: analyze every publicly traded company on all three major US stock exchanges — the NYSE, NASDAQ, and AMEX — and categorize each one based on whether it exploits animals.
Users can look up any publicly traded company and see exactly how it uses (or doesn’t use) animals. The evaluation criteria covers animal testing, leather and hide, fur, meat and dairy, eggs, entertainment involving animals, breeding for food or testing, and the sale of animal by-products. The result is two clear lists: companies that exploit animals, and companies that don’t.
For investors who want their portfolios to reflect their values, this is the research they need — and it didn’t exist in one place before Cruelty Free Investing built it.
Why This Matters — The Bigger Picture
Ethical investing isn’t a niche anymore. In 2020 alone, $13.7 billion flowed into responsible investment funds — up from $5.6 billion the year before. The launch of the VEGN ETF in 2019, the first vegan exchange-traded fund tracking the US Vegan Climate Index, signaled that institutional money was paying attention too.
Cruelty Free Investing has become a recognized resource in this space. PETA references them in their cruelty-free investing guide. Financial advisors like Tom Nowak of Quantum Financial Planning recommend them to clients. Green America has cited their work in plant-based investing coverage. Publications including AskTraders and Mashinii have featured them as a key resource for ethical investors.
The demand is real. More people want to know where their money goes, and they need reliable, thoroughly researched data to make those decisions. That’s what Cruelty Free Investing provides — and that’s where our work comes in.
What We Actually Do
Our role isn’t traditional web development. The client provides us with listings of publicly traded companies. Our job is deep research — reading SEC filings, company websites, annual reports, news articles, and other public documents to determine whether each company is involved in animal exploitation.
This isn’t checkbox work. A company’s website might say nothing about animal testing, but their SEC filings tell a different story. A supplier two layers deep in the supply chain might be running factory farms. A “cruelty-free” label on one product line doesn’t mean the parent company is clean. You have to read between the lines, cross-reference sources, and understand how corporate structures actually work.
Based on this research, we report our findings back to the Cruelty Free Investing team. They make the final classification decisions. We provide the raw research that makes those decisions possible.
The difference between someone who cares about the outcome and someone who doesn’t shows up in the work. When you genuinely don’t want animals to be harmed, you dig deeper. You read one more filing. You check one more source. That’s not something you can fake, and over six years of ongoing work, it compounds into research that people and organizations trust.
The Personal Element
I’m not fully vegan yet — working on it. Definitely not an activist. But I have a deep respect for animals, and I simply don’t want to see them hurt. That’s it. You don’t have to be at an extreme to care — you just have to be honest about where you stand.
This project reminded us of something we already believed but don’t always get to practice: the best work happens when you genuinely care about what you’re doing. Most of our projects are technical challenges — scale this, fix that, automate the other thing. We care about doing those well because we’re craftspeople. But Cruelty Free Investing is different. We care about the work and the mission. That combination is rare, and when it shows up, you feel it in the quality of what gets delivered.
Why We Said Yes
At MOTS Technologies, we take on work that we can be honest about. We don’t pretend to care about things we don’t. We don’t take projects where we’d have to sell something we don’t believe in. Cruelty Free Investing is the opposite of that — it’s a project where sincerity is the job requirement, and we happen to have it.
Six years in, we’re still here. Still researching. Still reading the filings other people skip. If that tells you anything about how we work, good — that’s the point.
If you’re curious about cruelty-free investing or want to look up how any publicly traded US company scores on animal welfare, visit crueltyfreeinvesting.org.