Interview Series: Anastasia Kuskova

This week’s read time: 5 minutes

Welcome to the Green Digest Interview Series, our new bi-weekly feature showcasing conversations with the industry’s leading voices—CSOs, sustainability directors, and other senior professionals shaping the sustainability landscape. Each edition dives into their professional journeys, hands-on insights, and outlook on the challenges and opportunities defining corporate sustainability.

These interviews are designed to be quick, insightful reads, offering you actionable takeaways and a personal glimpse into the people leading the way. Stay tuned for stories, strategies, and lessons that matter to you.

The insights presented in the Green Digest Interview Series are brought to you by a partnership between Green Digest and The Sustainability Circle, the invite-only community empowering senior sustainability leaders through peer-to-peer professional development. Check if you qualify for membership here.

PROFILE

This week’s guest:

Anastasia Kuskova

CEO & Co-founder at Sirius

Anastasia Kuskova is the CEO and co-founder of Sirius, an AI-driven sustainability intelligence platform for metals, mining, energy, and heavy industries. Sirius captures and adapts all ESG data, turning it into a live, structured source of truth. It eliminates manual reporting and ESG form-filling, making data instantly available in any format, for any request.

Before founding Sirius, Anastasia was Head of Sustainability at a multibillion-dollar metals and mining company, building the function from the ground up. She co-developed Re|Source, a battery traceability platform backed by Glencore, Tesla, and Umicore, and was part of the World Economic Forum’s Mining & Metals Platform, shaping industry-wide sustainability strategies. She was recognized as one of the 100 Global Inspirational Women in Mining (WIM100) and led Sirius to win the COP29 Sustainable Innovation Challenge.

You had a successful career as a sustainability officer in a multibillion-dollar metals company, yet you chose to step away and build a startup. What drove that decision? Was there a particular gap or challenge that convinced you the industry needed a better solution?

Anastasia: Oh, I’m building from very personal frustrations. Sustainability data is completely broken. The industry tries to squeeze it into an accounting framework—reducing everything to numbers while ignoring context.

The tools give you a report full of numbers, and for everything else? Write it yourself. Dig through policies, summarize reports, translate strategy into investor-friendly soundbites. The entire context of sustainability reporting sits in people’s heads.

And nobody goes into sustainability to spend their time filling out Excel questionnaires.

I wanted to build a system that actually unlocks the expertise of sustainability teams. One that eliminates the manual, repetitive burden of responding to data requests while providing real insights on what matters to customers and stakeholders.

What is Sirius, and how does it help sustainability teams?

Anastasia: Sirius eliminates the ESG data mess, turning fragmented, highly contextual sustainability information into structured, usable, and instantly shareable data.

Sustainability teams waste 60-80% of their time manually reshaping data for banks, investors, regulators, and suppliers, each demanding a different format. Sirius acts as a universal adapter, instantly transforming ESG data to fit any requirement.

At its core is the Sustainability Twin™, a real-time digital profile consolidating all qualitative and quantitative ESG data—policies, reports, ERPs—in one place. Our AI-powered adapter then formats this data for every stakeholder, cutting manual work by 70% and providing clear insights into priorities and gaps.

How do you convince C-suites that investing in sustainability intelligence and tools is a business advantage rather than just an added cost?

Anastasia: Show the money.

Anyone still pushing sustainability for the sake of “doing the right thing” is completely oblivious to the current state of the world. Those days are gone. Sustainability today is a value question. The sooner companies accept that, the faster they’ll get to results.

Sirius is built for that practical, value-driven reality. We connect sustainability directly to value, and help align sustainability initiatives with what customers and investors are actually willing to pay for.

I believe in the coming months we’ll see more banks and insurers pricing climate risk, green premiums shifting from PR to real B2B pricing, and "green" products happening only when buyers pay—and they will.

The EU Omnibus Simplification Package has introduced new layers of regulatory complexity while also reducing the number of companies required to report. Do you feel this has reduced your addressable market, and what steps are you taking to adapt?

Anastasia: No, we never bet on CSRD.

I’ve been vocal about the need to radically simplify the requirements and guidance for companies. The original scope—including mid-sized companies—was a massive overreach. But the way Omnibus has been handled is a disaster. The fact that it took Trump for the European Commission to finally hear business concerns is ridiculous. Changing the rules mid-preparation discourages investment and creates more uncertainty—not less.

As for Sirius, CSRD was always just a requirement to cover, not our value proposition. We built a system that adapts to any format, any stakeholder (customers, banks, regulators), and any request—structured (e.g. CDP, CSRD) or free-form (e.g. customer excel form in Korean).

If anything, Omnibus just proves that our approach is the right one: get your data right, and make it effortless to adjust to whatever requirement comes next.

Launching a startup is challenging, but building one in sustainability comes with even greater hurdles. What have been the biggest obstacles, and how have you navigated them? On a personal level, how do you handle the pressures of leading a startup in this space?

Anastasia: Our biggest challenge early on was meeting the quality standards of highly demanding, multinational clients: understanding the context, frameworks, and industry-specific language they operate in. Capturing that requires deep industry expertise, so we built world-class methodology and AI tech teams. Together, they develop an algorithm capable of understanding nuances—for example, distinguishing between IRMA and the ICMM consolidated standard, something most systems simply can’t do.

Beyond that, we’re forging alliances with industry associations and standard setters to build the workspace that connects sustainability, sales, and compliance teams across the value chain—from mines to OEMs—powered by the most relevant primary data.

Anastasia’s journey reminds us that building something meaningful—especially in sustainability—requires not just vision, but resilience, precision, and an unwavering focus on creating lasting change. We thank her for her openness, and for giving us a glimpse into what it takes to lead with both clarity and conviction.

We’ll see you again in two weeks with another thoughtful conversation. Until then, take care and stay inspired. ⭐️

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