Dag Messelt - A founder's story

Dag Messelt: The conviction behind SustainAX

For the SustainAX co-founder, building a company has meant turning a deeply held belief into something practical: better research, better financial decisions and, ultimately, a way to put specialist knowledge to work far beyond the capacity of a small team.

Since early 2019, Dag Messelt was working through a problem that would help define his future company. During the pandemic’s work-from-home period, he had completed a large number of ESG analyses of businesses that major research providers did not cover. Each required work from the ground up. There was no existing assessment to lean on, and no obvious shortcut. Writing on LinkedIn, he asked why smaller and private companies often received weaker ESG ratings, and what an analyst should actually conclude from that. See more: LinkedIn

Two years later, he announced the launch of SustainAX. His explanation was unusually personal for a financial-services announcement.

“I find purpose and meaning in working with Sustainability,” he wrote, explaining that he wanted to devote his working life to it. After nearly three decades in financial markets, this was a deliberate choice about what the next part of his career should be for. See more: LinkedIn

Read together, those two pieces of writing offer a useful introduction to Messelt as a founder: someone who had found both a problem worth solving and a reason to commit himself to solving it.

A founder shaped by experience

Messelt’s route to SustainAX was international and far from linear. Educated at NHH in Norway and HEC in France, he began his professional life in Paris. His career took him through BNP Paribas, Société Générale and Lehman Brothers, with responsibilities spanning financial markets, specialist teams and, later, asset-management product development. See more: effas.com

His own account includes working at Lehman Brothers through its final period, running an e-commerce company and moving from Paris back to the Nordics in 2013 for family reasons. SustainAX was therefore not his first encounter with entrepreneurship. Nor was it his first professional reinvention. See more: LinkedIn

When Alfred Berg announced his appointment as an investment specialist in 2014, it highlighted two decades of financial-market experience, much of it gained in France. His role included bringing Norwegian and Nordic investment products to international investors. See more: NTB Kommunikasjon

From 2019, his work increasingly focused on sustainable and responsible investment, including the shortage of ESG risk research for private credit and smaller equity issuers. The eventual business idea grew out of that work inside asset management. See more: effas.com

This matters to his founder story. He was not approaching financial institutions solely with an environmental argument. He understood the investment process, the demands placed on financial professionals and the distance between possessing information and being able to use it.

The questions came before the company

Messelt’s earlier LinkedIn writing shows that the central ideas behind SustainAX were taking shape before its incorporation.

In November 2020, he challenged asset managers over what they meant by ESG integration. Purchasing ratings and reporting a portfolio’s sustainability profile, he argued, did not demonstrate that environmental, social and governance risks were genuinely influencing investment decisions. The important question was what happened inside the investment process. See more: LinkedIn

His analysis of smaller companies was similarly demanding. Limited resources could help explain weaker disclosures or less developed sustainability programmes, but that did not justify automatically dismissing the resulting risks. An analyst still had to examine governance, practical measures and evidence of implementation. Understanding a company’s circumstances was different from lowering the standard of analysis. See more: sustainax.com

Other articles explored the complications behind apparently straightforward sustainability stories. Writing about electrification and seabed mining, for example, he examined the environmental and social questions associated with supplying the materials needed for a changing economy. A beneficial end product did not remove the need to investigate how it was produced. See more: LinkedIn

Taken together, these articles reveal a habit of mind that would become important to the business: resist the convenient conclusion, examine the underlying exposure and ask what the evidence actually supports.

They also suggest that SustainAX was more than an attempt to enter a growing market. It was an effort to build a service around the kind of analysis its founder believed the market needed.

Building the substance, report by report

SustainAX was founded in Malmö in February 2021. In an interview with NordSIP that August, Messelt described a research business focused on private and smaller companies overlooked by larger providers. Coverage was directed by investor requests. By then, the company had researched 110 Nordic companies and released two sector reports. See more: nordsip.com

The proposition was concrete: investors with gaps in their research coverage could draw on specialist analysis rather than attempting to assemble everything themselves.

That meant building a functioning research operation, not simply articulating a view of how the industry should work. SustainAX describes its beginnings as detailed analysis of annual reports, sustainability disclosures and financial filings. Its current research and technology leadership includes Susanna Lecander Messelt as Head of Research and Waqar Ali Subhani as Chief Technology Officer. The company’s development is a collective undertaking, combining subject expertise with engineering. See more: research.sustainax.com

A visible milestone came in February 2024, when SustainAX announced that its fundamental ESG research had become available on the Bloomberg Terminal. For a specialist research business, this placed its work inside an established professional investment environment. See more: research.sustainax.com

There is something revealing in this sequence. Before the software proposition, there were companies to analyse, evidence to assess and research to deliver. The methodology had to be used in practice.

Willing to challenge the industry he serves

Messelt’s public writing does not suggest someone particularly comfortable with superficial agreement.

In a LinkedIn post accompanying an opinion piece in Kapital, he argued that portfolio managers needed to read and understand the fundamental research behind an ESG score. The number itself could not do the analytical work for them. See more: LinkedIn

In a 2024 interview with BankShift, he applied the same scrutiny to banks. Giving credit advisers a sustainability questionnaire was insufficient if they did not understand the questions or how the answers should influence a lending decision. He wanted to see working processes, relevant expertise and evidence that stated intentions were being implemented. He also acknowledged that taking an imperfect first step was better than doing nothing. See more: BankShift

That combination is important. His criticism is not simply that institutions are failing to do enough. It is that they can spend considerable effort on an activity without resolving the underlying risk-management problem.

At the same time, his sustainability argument remains grounded in business economics. In a December 2020 article, he rejected the idea that sustainability necessarily conflicts with shareholder value. His position was that the treatment of employees, suppliers, resources and other stakeholders can be integral to a company’s long-term viability. See more: sustainax.com

Purpose and commercial logic are therefore connected in his thinking. The ambition is to make sustainability consequential within financial decision-making, rather than leave it as a separate statement of good intentions.

Experience has not ended the learning

There is another side to Messelt’s professional confidence: a continuing willingness to study.

In May 2020, he wrote on LinkedIn about completing the Certified ESG Analyst qualification and encouraged other investment professionals to pursue structured education. He presented it as a way of strengthening the connection between financial-market knowledge and sustainability expertise. See more: LinkedIn

Five years later, an EFFAS interview published on LinkedIn found him studying climate risk in greater depth through its ECRA programme. Asked about the experience, he described an unexpected effect:

“The positive surprise was the surfacing appetite to dig into the rest, to understand and learn more.”

The interview emphasised his interest in connecting the scientific mechanisms of climate risk with exposure, business consequences and financial decisions. See more: LinkedIn

He now also serves on the EFFAS ESG Review Panel, which helps safeguard the quality of the federation’s ESG qualifications, syllabuses and examinations. See more: effas.com

For a founder whose business rests on expertise, this is a meaningful distinction. Knowledge is not presented as something acquired once and then packaged indefinitely. It requires maintenance, challenge and further development.

Taking the research into software

The next chapter of SustainAX is about extending the reach of that expertise. The company is taking the methodology developed through its research work into software for banks and asset managers. Its own account of the transition is explicit: the research came first, and the platform is being built around it. See more: research.sustainax.com

Messelt’s writing about automation shows the same priorities that appeared in his earlier articles about investment analysis.

In April 2026, he argued that sustainability-risk automation needs defined analytical steps, clear rules and a bounded role for AI. The objective is not simply to generate convincing text. It is to produce assessments whose reasoning can be followed, challenged and reproduced with a high degree of consistency.

“The right objective is not AI theatre. It is defensible automation,” he wrote. See more: research.sustainax.com

In a related article, he argued that banks first need to define what sustainability risk means for their portfolios and decision processes. Data collection and automation cannot substitute for that methodological work. See more: research.sustainax.com

This makes the software development a continuation of the original founder thesis. The question has evolved from how to conduct better research on overlooked companies to how to make that research available at a scale a small analyst team could never reach manually.

It also creates a demanding test. Greater speed will only advance the mission if the resulting analysis remains useful, traceable and sufficiently sensitive to the circumstances of individual companies. The technology must preserve the distinctions that made the research worth doing.

A personal ambition with a practical test

In describing the journey himself, Messelt returns to the years spent building the research and materiality framework from scratch. Bringing that work into automated software is, for him, the realisation of a long-held ambition: seeing something developed through sustained effort become useful to a much wider market.

The ambition is larger than producing more reports. It is to help the people allocating capital understand risks they might otherwise miss, and to make that understanding part of actual investment and lending decisions.

The commercial outcome is still being built. A strong methodology does not, by itself, guarantee institutional adoption or a successful software business.

But the continuity in Messelt’s story is already visible. Before SustainAX, he was asking whether financial institutions truly understood the risks behind the scores. As a research founder, he set about supplying the missing analysis. As the company develops its software, the challenge is to extend that capability without losing the substance.

The tools are changing. The reason for building them is recognisably the one he set out at the beginning.