Updapt Wants to Put ESG’s Paperwork to Work

A sustainability report may arrive dressed for the boardroom. The numbers underneath it usually have a less glamorous commute. They travel from operating sites, finance systems, suppliers and people who have other jobs to do. Before a company can explain its environmental footprint, someone has to assemble it. Updapt has built a business around that assignment.

The clearest example sits inside an investor’s own reporting. Everstone says it adopted Updapt to monitor more than 185 key performance indicators across its invested companies and group businesses. Its 2024 sustainability report even includes a picture of the dashboard. This is a useful place to begin understanding the product: a collection of separate businesses needs a shared view of performance, with enough detail to investigate what sits behind the totals.

Updapt sells cloud software for environmental, social and governance work, usually shortened to ESG. Its suite covers data management, greenhouse-gas accounting, reporting, analytics, supplier assessments and portfolio assessments. Net-zero planning and climate-risk tools extend the proposition beyond recording the past. The intended users are enterprises, investment funds and lenders, whose questions stretch from how much energy a site consumed to which assets deserve closer attention.

The attraction is practical. A sustainability team needs figures it can reuse, explain and compare. Management wants those figures to say something about the business. Updapt is trying to serve both audiences with the same underlying records. The annual report is one destination for that work; a decision about energy, suppliers or investment is another.

02Three years before the sales pitch

Updapt’s origins help explain this emphasis on data. Co-founder and chief executive Mithun Suvarna brought roughly 15 years of experience, largely at Thomson Reuters, in corporate sustainability and responsible investment. The business began in 2019. Sangath D Babu and Supreeth Rao were fellow founders, and Satish Ramchandani joined as a fourth co-founder to lead business development.

“We took our time, about three years, to build our product,” Suvarna told Forbes India in September 2024. That is an unusually patient sentence in startup coverage. It also fits the job: ESG software has to accommodate the way organizations already collect information, as well as the different ways outsiders expect them to present it.

Ramchandani described the initial problem at the India Responsible Capital Conference in 2023. Sustainability information was scattered across operations and business functions. Companies were devoting substantial effort to administration and carbon accounting, leaving less time for designing and implementing decarbonization strategies. The bottleneck the founders identified was the work of assembling and handling evidence.

The founding team combined sustainability knowledge with finance and commercial experience. Ramchandani’s background includes CRISIL, Edelweiss and Bank of America Merrill Lynch; Rao’s includes advisory and taxation work at EY. That mix matters in a product sold to organizations where the person supplying a number, the person checking it and the person approving the budget may sit in three different departments.

03A dashboard is only the visible part

Updapt’s data-management proposition is to centralize collection and consolidation. Its reporting software then draws on that information to prepare outputs aligned with different sustainability frameworks. Analytics adds comparisons and dashboards. For the customer, the useful connection is between those stages: a figure gathered once should remain traceable as it moves into calculations, management reviews and disclosures.

In a 2024 interview, Ramchandani described API connectors that allow the platform to integrate with a client’s existing enterprise systems. He also pointed to audit trails, customizable dashboards, peer benchmarking and the ability to examine performance across sites, segments, products and processes. These are product capabilities described by the company, rather than a promise that every installation delivers the same result.

Take an illustrative business with several operating sites. Its first task is to agree which locations and activities belong in the inventory. It can then collect activity data, calculate emissions and compare results. A rise in a total becomes a question to investigate: did production increase, did the energy mix change, or did the company begin counting something it previously missed? The software can organize the inquiry; people still have to answer it.

That is why the quieter features deserve attention. Definitions, reporting periods, approvals and the history of a record can matter as much as a polished chart. A dashboard earns its place when a user can follow a result back to the information behind it. Otherwise, a colorful display simply makes a disputed number easier to admire.

04One customer, 185-plus questions

Everstone’s deployment illustrates the portfolio use case. An investment firm has to see across businesses that operate differently. A common monitoring system provides a place to bring their indicators together. The reported 185-plus KPIs describe the breadth of that monitoring exercise; they are not a count of emissions reductions or a measure of software-generated savings.

The wider customer story spans operating companies too. Updapt publishes a testimonial from Tata Power’s environment and climate-change head describing environmental dashboards, greenhouse-gas accounting and peer analysis. Its public client materials also feature Cipla, SKF and Apollo Hospitals. Energy, manufacturing and healthcare bring different operations to the same basic reporting problem.

A Philippines partnership announcement in April 2026 described Updapt as serving more than 100 businesses globally. Treat that as a company-reported snapshot. The interesting point is the combination of customer types: an enterprise may want to inspect its own sites, while a fund or lender needs information from businesses it does not run day to day. Supplier and portfolio assessment tools give Updapt routes into both kinds of relationship.

05The expansion runs through people

For a buyer, the business model is enterprise SaaS, sold through product demonstrations and discussions about the organization’s needs. The purchasing decision is broader than access to software. A useful evaluation also accounts for configuration, integration, data preparation, training and the staff time needed to keep records current. Those are buying considerations, not a quoted Updapt price.

The company’s own financing history shows a measured start. Updapt was selected for the Accenture Sustainability Value Accelerator, run with IIM Ahmedabad’s CIIE.CO, in May 2022. The cohort contained ten startups chosen from more than 80 applicants, with seed funding and business-development support described as part of the program.

By September 2024, Suvarna told Forbes India that the existing operation was almost at breakeven, while expansion would require more money. The distinction is revealing. Supporting an installed product and establishing a wider sales presence are different financial jobs. His comment describes the business at that time, rather than its current profitability.

Partnerships offer one route to that wider presence. Updapt announced an alliance with Grant Thornton Advisory East Africa in July 2024. In April 2026, ECC International announced its Philippines partnership, pairing local sustainability consulting and capability building with Updapt’s software. The division of labor makes sense: customers need help deciding how to organize the work as well as somewhere to put the resulting data.

06From yesterday’s footprint to tomorrow’s exposure

Updapt’s August 2026 Climate Risk Management launch makes its direction clearer. The module is designed to identify, assess and prioritize climate-related risks across assets and locations, connecting that information to the broader ESG reporting workflow. It asks customers to look ahead at exposure as well as back at measured performance.

That extends the product’s role inside a company. Sustainability teams may collect and interpret environmental information, but decisions about vulnerable assets can also involve finance and operating management. Connecting risk information with existing records gives those functions a shared starting point. It does not settle the commercial judgment about which action deserves funding.

The rest of the suite follows a similar pattern. Net-zero tools support target tracking; supplier assessments bring information from outside the organization into view; portfolio tools serve investors and lenders. Double-materiality assessment addresses both a company’s effects on people and the environment and the sustainability issues that may affect the company. Each adds a different question to the data already being collected.

In market terms, Updapt sits among enterprise sustainability-management platforms. Buyers can also assess offerings such as IBM Envizi, SAP Sustainability and specialist carbon-accounting software, or retain a mix of spreadsheets and consulting. Updapt’s case rests on the breadth of its connected workflow and its domain knowledge. The fair comparison is whether a product can handle the buyer’s actual records, organizational structure and reporting needs.

A dashboard earns its place when a user can follow a result back to the information behind it.THE BUYER’S TEST

07Borrow the sequence, earn the result

There is a useful lesson here for readers who never buy Updapt. Start with an agreed inventory of what you measure. Name the people responsible for supplying and reviewing it. Preserve the supporting records. Only then build comparisons, targets and recurring reports. Automation has more to work with when those decisions are explicit.

A practical demonstration should follow a real number from entry to disclosure. Ask how the system handles a corrected value, an incomplete submission or a changed organizational boundary. Then ask how a manager identifies the site or supplier that needs attention. Those questions test the connection between collecting data and using it, which is the center of Updapt’s proposition.

The conditions matter. If suppliers cannot provide usable information, an assessment tool still needs a plan for the gaps. If departments disagree about definitions, integration will carry that disagreement into a shared system. If no one owns the follow-up action, a target can remain a line on a screen. These are implementation dependencies, not evidence of a particular Updapt customer failing.

Updapt’s most persuasive role is therefore specific: make sustainability information easier to gather, inspect and use across a complicated organization. Everstone’s monitoring system shows that role in practice. The newer risk tools enlarge the ambition. Whether the next decision concerns a factory, a supplier or a portfolio company, the test remains wonderfully unglamorous: can the people responsible explain the number, and do something useful with it?