Impact data company Upright announced the launch of its new AI-powered sustainability due diligence tool, aimed at enabling investors to model company sustainability, risks and opportunities, using just a company URL.
According to Upright, the new solution aims to address key issues challenging the usefulness of sustainability due diligence for decision-making, which it said it typically based on reported information, while ignoring crucial aspects such as value chain risks, supply chain dependencies, and end-use market exposure.
Annu Nieminen, founder and CEO at Upright, said:
“ESG due diligence has one core job: help investors understand whether sustainability is a risk or an opportunity in a deal in the future. It has largely failed at that job – not because sustainability doesn’t drive returns, but because the traditional manual process has been staring at internal and operational aspects, when the actual make-or-break risks and opportunities sit outside the company, in the value chain: the cost of raw materials, supply constraints, end-use changes driven by regulation.”
According to Upright, the new solution enables investors to enter a target company’s website URL to produce a sustainability assessment which models the impacts, risks, and opportunities of the company’s products, services, and value chain dependencies, with results covering frameworks including CSRD double materiality, UN SDGs, PAI indicators, EU Taxonomy, and net impact.
Upright added that the solution works for both listed and unlisted companies, enabling private markets investors and asset managers to analyze and screen both private and listed assets.
Nieminen said:
“ESG data is about to flip. Right now, 90% of sustainability information investors use comes from company disclosures and 10% from outside-in modelling. Within a few years, I expect that ratio to invert. Take physical climate risk: understanding whether a factory is in a flood zone requires satellite imagery and location data – not a company’s sustainability report. Most of the sustainability factors that drive financial outcomes work the same way. “
