Upright launches AI-powered sustainability due diligence – changing what ESG analysis can do for investors

• First real-time sustainability due diligence tool for any asset: Investors can now screen any asset – listed or unlisted – for sustainability impacts, risks, and opportunities in real time.
• Outside-in modelling: The tool builds on Upright's proprietary data engine – eight years in development – which models companies and funds from their products and value chains rather than self-reported disclosures.
• Multiple frameworks: Results cover CSRD-aligned double materiality, SFDR estimates on EU taxonomy and PAIs, and impact outcomes such as UN SDGs and net impact – all in one pass.
• Trusted foundation: Built on methodology trusted by financial institutions like EQT, APG, LGT, Churchill, Coller Capital, Altor, and the European Investment Bank.

Upright, the Helsinki-based impact data company, launches an AI-powered sustainability due diligence tool for investors, enabling real-time modelling of any target company's sustainability impacts, risks, and opportunities from its business model and value chain, without requiring any company-specific data from the user as a source.

To use the new solution, an investor enters a target company's website URL. Upright's proprietary data engine, developed over 8 years, produces a sustainability assessment in minutes by modelling sustainability impacts, risks, and opportunities of the company's products, services, and value chain dependencies. Results can be instantly explored through various data lenses, including CSRD double materiality, UN SDGs, PAI indicators, EU Taxonomy, and net impact. They also cover financial effects and enable real-time peer benchmarking across Upright’s database of 50,000+ companies.

The tool works for listed and unlisted companies alike. Private markets investors, who have historically had the least access to sustainability intelligence on target companies, can use it to screen deals before committing time to deeper analysis.

Upright’s methodology underlying the tool is already trusted at the highest levels of institutional investing. EQT, APG, LGT, Churchill, and the European Investment Bank are among more than 150+ financial institutions globally that rely on Upright's proprietary data engine for ESG analysis, investment decision-making, LP communications, and regulatory compliance.

Who uses it and how

The tool is designed for both sustainability and investment teams working on deals and portfolio management.

Private market investors can:

• Conduct early red-flag screening of sustainability impacts, risks, and opportunities tied to a target’s business model and value chain
• Compare targets to peers across markets across ESRS double materiality, SFDR estimates, and impact outcomes
• Save time and cost by automating ESG pre-screening across full deal flow

Asset managers and owners can:

• Consistently analyse sustainability impacts, risks and opportunities for any private asset with data as comparable as for listed assets
• Conduct scalable materiality analysis, GHG estimation, and sustainable investment classification across large portfolios

The wider shift: AI comes to sustainable investing

Annu Nieminen, founder and CEO at Upright states that it is no wonder that investors have viewed ESG due diligence as a tick-the-box compliance exercise rather than a key lens to deal decision-making – and that the tools available have made it difficult to do anything else.

Nieminen 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. Since 2017, we have built Upright to look at the full picture, drawing on hundreds of millions of scientific sources, not internally focused compliance.”

Nieminen expects the balance between disclosure-based and modelled sustainability data to shift significantly over the coming years.

“Company disclosures tell you what a company decided to report about its past. Outside-in-modeling, like what we do at Upright, tells you what is structurally true about a business today — its products, its value chain, its exposure to sustainability-driven change. For an investor trying to understand the future of an asset, those are fundamentally different things.”

“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. That’s why forward-looking investors are already making two moves: building internal AI capabilities and shifting to outside-in third-party data.”

The new launch follows Upright's release of instant double materiality assessments for companies in October 2025 — a tool that lets any organisation generate a full ESRS-aligned materiality analysis from just a company URL, in minutes. Both tools are built on the same proprietary data infrastructure.

With the ability to model any asset — product, company, or fund — in real time now unlocked, Upright plans to release further real-time products throughout 2026, for both companies and investors.

About Upright:

The Upright Project is a Helsinki-based independent data production company and the creator of the world's largest impact quantification model of the global private sector. Upright’s proprietary data engine quantifies sustainability impacts, risks, and opportunities instantly for any asset – product, company, fund –, benchmarked across a library of 35,000 funds and 50,000 companies. Today, more than 300 businesses and investors like Orkla, Swarovski, European Investment Bank, Pictet, APG, and EQT rely on Upright’s science-based model to bring instant transparency to ESG and sustainability.