Interview Series: Annu Nieminen

We’re back with the Interview Series.

After a short pause, we’re excited to restart our conversations with sustainability leaders. Going forward, interviews will land sometimes weekly, sometimes bi-weekly.

As always, if you have feedback or topics you’d like us to explore, simply reply to this email.

Appreciate you being part of this community,
- Ardit

This week’s read time: 5 minutes

Welcome to the Green Digest Interview Series, our 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.

PROFILE

This week’s guest:

Annu Nieminen

Founder & CEO at The Upright Project

Annu is an engineer and action woman behind Upright, the Helsinki-based impact data company.

Her years at McKinsey sparked an obsession with quantifying the holistic net impact of companies: Working with financial valuations, she realised most corporate decisions are made with one eye closed – with no quantifiable understanding of the value and harm companies create beyond financials.

She’s now spent 8 years on building the leading data engine to instantly quantify the sustainability impacts, risks, and opportunities of any asset – product, company, fund – based on what global scientific research knows, not sustainability reports.

Today, Nieminen is a well-known thought leader in sustainability, known for her direct, data-driven opinions and awarded e.g. as the Nordic Tech Entrepreneur of the Year and an Innovator under 35 by MIT.

She’s also a proud mom, a mentor for young women in tech, and a speaker on how to build successful tech companies around the most pressing problems of our time.

What does Upright Project do, who do you work with, and what problem are you helping solve?

We are an AI-era data production company that quantifies sustainability impacts, risks, and opportunities for organisations like Nasdaq, Orkla, Swarovski, the European Investment Bank, and Pictet.

Over the last eight years, we’ve built the market’s only end-to-end impact quantification engine that can model sustainability for any product, company, or portfolio — in real time, in real monetary values, and without needing a single sustainability report as a source. Instead of workshops and surveys, we use AI to “ask science,” processing hundreds of millions of scientific studies to understand what products and services actually do to the world.

The problem we solve is that companies spend thousands of hours producing qualitative, survey-based sustainability data that is internally focused, while their largest risks and opportunities sit hidden in value chains. This leads to increased exposure to material financial risk, audit risk, and greenwashing claims.

Upright replaces this with real-time, traceable, benchmarked data produced at scale by machines, so leaders can focus on action, not data gathering.

One of the biggest questions companies face today is how to translate impacts, risks, and opportunities into financial terms that resonate with finance teams. In practice, what does “financially meaningful” sustainability data actually look like?

"Climate change is a high risk" doesn't cut it anymore.

Sustainability teams need numeric answers: "How big will our financial exposure from climate change be by 2028? By 2030?" and "What's the P&L impact of mitigating health issues in our value chain?" They need to explain sustainability in financial and risk terms. Both leadership and regulation like CSRD increasingly demand this.

At Upright, we quantify financial effects of sustainability risks and opportunities across P&L, balance sheet, and cash flow. Finance teams can't operate on backward-looking 100-page PDFs, so we enable future-looking scenario modeling.

This type of data – putting a price tag on sustainability – bridges the language gap between sustainability and finance. It has the power to guide business priorities, investment decisions, and enterprise risk management.

As sustainability becomes less of a standalone function and more part of finance and risk discussions, what has this shift changed for you as a solution provider in terms of who the buyer is, the expectations you face, and how companies engage with you?

The "special treatment" for sustainability is definitely over. The sustainability teams we work with need a clear, quantified business case, just like any other budget allocation decision. If they can’t show the ROI, they can’t justify the CAPEX. So we work to build those cases with them.

Finance and risk leaders are often directly involved in our process now, or even the primary buyer. That demands financial-grade data.

At the same time, budgets are tighter, and many companies are questioning expensive, consultant-led processes. We hear a lot of “we don’t want another 86 materiality workshops” these days. This shift has also changed our role with consultancies: we now partner with them directly, helping scale sustainability assignments without scaling headcount.

When a CFO asks, “Why should we spend money on sustainability this year?”, what is the wrong answer that sustainability teams still give too often? And what should the right one be?

The wrong answer: "Because it's the right thing to do," or "Because the regulation says so." “Doing good” isn’t enough anymore, and tickbox regulatory exercises miss the opportunity to feed business strategy.

The right answer: "Because we currently risk mispricing our core business risks and opportunities from sustainability, and our competitors are already moving."

And finally, what do you think will remain relevant, and what do you expect to quietly fall away? And how does that shape Upright’s priorities going forward?

The assumption that companies are the best source of truth about their own sustainability impacts is dying. According to CDP, only 4% of the average company's greenhouse gas emissions occur internally and 96% sit in the value chain. Expecting every company to manually calculate that complexity across climate, health, biodiversity, social impacts, and beyond simply doesn’t make sense.

As a result, stakeholder workshops and surveys are falling away as the primary source of sustainability data. They’re being replaced by technology-enabled, outside-in data production.

We already see this in practice: 90% of Upright’s over 150 CSRD double materiality assessments customers have skipped stakeholder surveys entirely, with a 100% assurance pass rate, including all Big 4 auditors.

This is the AI transformation for sustainability, and Upright helps companies and investors win in it instead of getting run over. This spring, we will publish multiple updates to our real-time, full-spectrum data modeling tools.

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