Upright launches free real-time double materiality assessments – a push to end the era of self-assessed sustainability

• First real-time impact quantification tool: Replaces months of manual workshops and surveys with automated, data-based analysis on companies’ sustainability.
• Full double materiality assessment in minutes: Generates a full double materiality assessment (DMA) in minutes using just a company URL, providing instant clarity on key impacts, risks, and opportunities.
• Trusted foundation: Built on the same methodology already used by Swarovski, Nasdaq, Orkla, Elisa, PwC, and Pictet, and approved in CSRD assurance by all major audit firms.
• Next step in Upright’s 8-year journey: Upright's years of developing sustainability data independent of company self-reporting is now made directly usable through new real-time technology. The DMA tool is the first of several upcoming real-time applications, including investor-focused tools.

Upright, the impact data production company, has launched the world’s first real-time double materiality assessment (DMA) tool, introducing AI-era efficiency and comparability to the sustainability data field still dominated by self-assessments and months of workshops, interviews, and desktop research.

The new self-serve lets anyone create a full double materiality assessment – the leading European sustainability reporting framework – using just their company URL, in minutes instead of months. The result is an in-depth analysis covering all 80+ ESRS (European Sustainability Reporting Standards) topics, with the ability to drill down to the impact and financial materiality of each of the company’s products and services individually.

The tool is free of charge to use for anyone seeking to understand a company’s sustainability impacts, risks, and opportunities, providing robust input for strategy and reporting for SMEs and enterprises regardless of industry. Organisations with advanced reporting or CSRD assurance needs can upgrade to Upright’s enterprise-level features, used today by leading European corporates and financial institutions, like Orkla, Nasdaq, Swarovski, and Pictet. Upright’s methodology has passed CSRD assurance by all major audit firms.

Sustainability at a crossroads

Sustainability work is facing the same AI turning point that is transforming every other knowledge industry. Until now, companies have assessed their own sustainability through manual processes that are both resource-intensive and inherently subjective.

Upright’s Founder & CEO Annu Nieminen shared:

“The first widely adopted wave of ESG assumed the world’s sustainability dilemmas would be solved if companies just reported more. It’s clear that it hasn’t worked. Too many sustainability experts still spend their days collecting data instead of driving change. Having built one of the world’s leading impact data engines, we felt it was almost our duty to give them a faster, better way — one that replaces manual work with traceable, comparable impact data tied to financial risks and opportunities.”

“The sustainability industry is starting to challenge the assumption that companies themselves would be the best source of truth about their own impacts. After all, most of them happen outside the company’s walls — across value chains and markets. With the best technology and human structuring, we can assess those impacts objectively, on a very granular product and service level, and with full comparability across companies and industries.”

How Upright builds sustainability assessments real-time

• First, the user feeds in their company URL. Upright fetches the companies’ product and service information from online sources, and matches that with global scientific research, public databases, and value chain impacts within its engine.
• Products are then run through the double materiality assessment framework, consisting of hundreds of detailed sustainability questions, using Upright’s pre-modelled answers for each.
• The result is an ESRS-aligned double materiality assessment with clear visuals. The user can then review and refine the results with company specific nuances, like detailed product information and revenue splits.
• More features are available for upgraders, including layering in extra input data, inviting colleagues to collaborate, benchmarking against peers, and translating results into anticipated financial effects.

Early traction and broad applicability

Before launch, Upright opened a waitlist for 1,000 early-access users — demand quickly exceeded expectations. Many early users began using the tool immediately to build their materiality analyses, with some recording hundreds of daily interactions with the tool.

Annu Nieminen shared:

“The response from early-access users has been encouraging. We’ve seen sustainability and finance people from both large corporations and SMEs migrate their materiality work straight into the tool, spending hours a day exploring their data and integrating their own insights. Some users from well-known companies now log 600–700 page views daily. That’s when you know the product is solving something real for them.”

Next step in Upright’s 8-year journey

After years of developing sustainability data independent of company self-reporting, recent technological advances now make Upright’s infrastructure directly usable. The double materiality tool is the first of several real-time applications the company will roll out — including investor-focused versions already in development.

Annu Nieminen said:

“Every industry is now finding its own AI revolution — and this is it for sustainability. What used to depend on self-reported disclosures can now be understood directly from data. Our message has been the same since 2017: the most reliable source of sustainability information is scientific research, not internal workshops or questionnaires. Now, with the latest technology and human-defined structuring, anyone can surface those answers at company level in minutes.”

For more information and exclusive interviews, please contact Pauliina Bogdanoff, VP, Marketing & Communications at Upright, at pauliina.bogdanoff@uprightproject.com or on +358 44 0241 616

Download high-resolution images of Upright’s team and product here

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.