Sustentra is developing SaaS ESG pre-assurance to help companies navigate upcoming disclosure requirements in the EU.
Helping an early-stage product find its structure, story, and strategy on a tight timeline.
Client
SaaS start-up affiliated with TSAI City and the Yale School of Management
Duration
March 2025, 3 weeks part-time
Roles
Product design, web design, branding
Brief
In 2023, the EU began phasing in the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), a sweeping set of disclosure requirements that will apply to thousands of companies by 2028. Preparing for these new compliance rules is challenging; requirements vary heavily by company size, sector, and geography, and the data demands are high.
Large companies can bring in consultants and established auditing firms to manage compliance, but traditional audits are costly and often slow, with delays compounding when mistakes aren’t caught early. Smaller businesses often don’t have the resources to keep up, or may be overwhelmed facing ESG assurance for the first time while still pulling documentation together.
Sustentra, an award-winning start-up from the Yale School of Management, is developing a pre-assurance platform that uses its proprietary AI system, FactFlow, to simplify three-way matching and flag compliance gaps before the audit begins. The goal: to streamline workflows for auditors and large enterprises while giving small businesses a leg up as they navigate CSRD for the first time.
Design Challenge
I worked closely with Sustentra's co-founders, two environmental finance students at the Yale School of Management, joining partway through discovery. On a short three-week timeline with funding deadlines looming, the team needed to quickly solidify the product and produce a clickable Figma prototype for demo recordings.
In addition to building the prototype, I also designed Sustentra's logo, branding, and website, including a lightweight design system with tokens and reusable components.
Discovery and Definition
What's Sustentra's wedge into a space owned by consultants and legacy tools?
By disrupting the traditional auditing workflow, Sustentra isn't only competing with consultants — it’s also up against established data management platforms like Tracera, AuditBoard, and Workiva. To gain traction, Sustentra needed to pair its standout IP with functionality in areas like data uploads, metric tracking, and document management.
Our team mapped the user journey for auditors and sustainability leads, spoke with stakeholders, and analyzed competitors to surface pain points in ESG assurance. We hit on a few key issues:
Ambiguity in requirements — ESG directives vary by company size and sector, leaving compliance rules open to interpretation. Many firms are forced to rely on expensive consultants to identify which metrics to fulfill, and redoing work when issues surface late in the audit is time-consuming and expensive.
Disorganized documentation: Raw data needs to be consolidated and submitted for final audits. However, data is scattered across departments and formats, and teams still need to manually input data for pre-assurance even using dedicated platforms like Workiva. This introduces error and makes it harder to turn over data for final audits, as the manual inputs live inside the third-party tool separate from the raw data.
Fragmented workflows: Between auditors, data management platforms, and in-house sustainability teams, companies are juggling multiple parties and tools. Submitting the right data becomes a tedious multi-stage task, especially for teams with distributed access to sensitive information, and progress is difficult to track.
We decided on a few features we needed to prioritize for the demo MVP:
A clear workflow designed around individual metrics, where Sustentra's product automatically determines the requisite requirements and structures data uploads as steps to fulfilling each metric, to ground a muddled workflow in actionable tasks.
A single consolidated database for all files, clearly connecting each supporting document to the sustainability metric it fulfills, to simplify handoff to auditors.
Automated data handling on the back end, extracting information from uploads and mapping them to the right metrics so teams avoid manual plug-and-chug.
An example persona card and accompanying user flow for a specific use case (verifying data fulfillment across departments).
Designing the MVP
After coming up with a feature list, we consolidated it all into four main screens:
A Dashboard, where users can quickly get a grasp of overall progress and quickly navigate to metrics or documents flagged for review.
A Metrics page, showing ESG metrics tailored to the company and the status of each metric's supporting data.
A Database page, containing all audit-necessary documents in their original formats, sortable by category and folder.
A CSRD page, containing a final analysis report pulled from a library of custom templates, where data and accompanying descriptions are auto-filled by Sustentra on the back end.
With this structure, we prioritized a metric-based workflow, with supervisors able to quickly navigate to unfulfilled metrics via the Dashboard or from flagged sections of the CSRD report.
Users can also access raw data easily, either directly through the Database or by opening supporting documentation from the corresponding metric on the Metrics page.
Annotated walkthrough of the demo MVP, highlighting the four core screens.
Reflection & Next Steps
This prototype was built in just three weeks of part-time work to support Sustentra’s funding applications. Though bare-bones, the demo helped the team successfully secure early funding and partner interest, and Sustentra has since expanded into demo trials with select partners under NDA. The team is currently testing a functional prototype as development continues.
Website & Branding
How do we create a visual identity that balances tech-forward SaaS and assurance-grade credibility?
While creating the demo prototype, I also worked with Sustentra's co-founders to build the company's online presence, delivering a new logo, visual identity, and website.
Sustentra needed to stand out in a wave of ESG startups trying to replace legacy firms as the go-to option for CSRD compliance. However, while the company's core differentiator is its AI-powered three-way matching engine, we wanted to avoid triggering the security concerns and red flags that prospective clients often associate with Sustentra's black-box AI competitors.
We built a palette around deep navy to evoke institutional credibility and set Sustentra apart from the typical beige-and-lime "eco" aesthetic. The logo is sleek and tech-forward but rendered in a heavier weight to avoid the delicate, geometric feel of AI branding.
Snapshots from the logo design process.
We used the website copy to highlight the user journey and explain how the tool streamlines existing workflows, making the software's role and handling of data easy to follow. The website's spacious layouts and clean, minimal typography align with modern SaaS conventions.
To prepare for dev handoff, I also built a design system using Figma variables with semantic tokens for typography, color, and spacing, along with reusable components to keep things consistent and scalable while awaiting additional edits.
Primitives and components for Sustentra's design system.
