About Susty
A mission worth compounding.
Empower consumers with free, centralized, transparent, and accurate sustainability ratings — at their fingertips.
Our mission
Sustainability as an everyday purchasing signal
Placing sustainability information directly in the hands of consumers bridges the gap between conscious buyers and the companies trying to earn them — and turns sustainability into a catalyst for genuine corporate change.
Our vision
The global go-to source for sustainability ratings
Today’s sustainability ecosystem is a closed B2B loop built for institutional investors and compliance teams. Susty replaces it with a consumer-led market in which companies are held accountable to the public for how they actually behave.
The problem, in full
Today’s ESG protects companies, not consumers.
Sustainability ratings are built for institutional investors and compliance teams. What trickles out to the public is marketing, not measurement.
Ratings locked away
Sustainability scores are confined to the corporate and institutional sphere. Companies spend millions chasing ratings that never reach — let alone inform — consumers.
Coverage barely exists
Fewer than 5% of public companies and just 0.04% of private companies globally have any sustainability score at all.
No consumer pressure
Without consumer visibility, companies face weak incentives to change. The loudest signal they hear is their own marketing.
Graded on paperwork
Heavy reliance on self-reporting biases ratings toward risk mitigation and compliance — not real-world sustainability performance.
“57% of consumers don’t trust most sustainability claims made by brands.”
Susty closes that trust gap — surfacing both positive and negative developments so performance is viewed in full context.
Why now
Three forces, one direction
Consumer demand
78% of U.S. consumers want to buy from environmentally friendly companies, and 60% would pay more for sustainable products. The intent exists — the information doesn’t.
Regulatory tailwind
EU CSRD, SEC climate rules, and state-level regimes make disclosure mandatory — expanding Susty’s data inputs and validating the consumer-facing model.
A market mid-shift
The ratings market is growing 30% annually while staying closed and B2B. The consumer side of the category is unclaimed — Susty defines it.
Market opportunity
The opportunity, quantified.
Corporate subscriptions lead early revenue; advertising compounds as the consumer base scales.
Corporate subscriptions
Sustainability ratings market growing 30% annually — to $4.3B by 2027.
- TAM
- $201B
- SAM
- $16.7B
- SOM
- $502M
Mobile app advertising
Global social advertising growing 17.1% annually — to $434B by 2028.
- TAM
- $434B
- SAM
- $55B
- SOM
- $276M
0%annual growth in the sustainability ratings market — while fewer than 5% of public companies hold any rating at all. The market isn’t just growing; it’s barely been built.
Founders & team
Built by the right people.
Chase L. Buzzell, J.D.
Co-Founder & CEO
Chase is an intellectual property attorney and sustainability professional with deep experience in enterprise ESG, corporate sustainability, and carbon markets. Working at the intersection of regulation, sustainability, and go-to-market strategy gave him firsthand insight into why today’s ESG systems protect companies and investors rather than consumers — and why the fix has to be built from the consumer’s side. He co-founded Susty to rebuild sustainability ratings as an independent, consumer-first public good.
Nikolai Bashkirov
Co-Founder & CTO
Nikolai owns every layer of Susty's technology. He built the iOS and Android apps from scratch, architected the cloud backend, and engineered the AI scoring pipeline that turns raw ESG disclosures into Susty's People / Planet / Practices ratings — the defensible core of the product.
He's a zero-to-one builder by track record: before Susty, he was the sole engineer behind a full-stack production platform that a logistics business has run on for 5+ years — designing and building its scheduling, automated quoting, and reservation systems from scratch. He holds a computer science degree from UC Berkeley and has contributed to the TypeScript SDK at Temporal Technologies.
A board and advisory bench — one operator, one sustainability-domain expert, one capital-markets voice — is being assembled alongside the seed round.
Headquarters
Eau Claire, Wisconsin
A lean, distributed operating model — founding team plus specialist contractors on cloud-native infrastructure. High-margin revenue streams designed for operating leverage, so profitability scales faster than headcount.
What we stand for
Ratings, rebuilt as a public good.
We’re shifting sustainability from a closed, compliance-driven system to an open, market-driven one. Talk to us.