Despite years of growth in ESG investing and corporate sustainability reporting, the vast majority of companies in the world have no sustainability score at all. The coverage that exists is heavily concentrated among large-cap public companies in developed markets — the companies already visible to institutional investors. For everyone else, the ratings landscape is essentially empty.
Who Gets Rated — and Who Doesn't
MSCI, Sustainalytics, and similar agencies collectively cover several thousand companies. There are an estimated 300 million businesses operating globally. The gap isn't a rounding error — it's a structural feature of how the ratings industry was built. Agencies focused their coverage where investor demand was highest: on companies large enough to appear in institutional portfolios, with the resources to complete detailed disclosure questionnaires. The economics made sense for the agencies. The resulting blind spot is enormous.
Small and medium enterprises are almost entirely uncovered. Yet SMEs account for the majority of employment and a substantial share of direct environmental impact in most economies. A consumer trying to evaluate the sustainability practices of a local supplier, a regional bank, a mid-size food manufacturer, or a growing e-commerce brand has essentially no ratings-based information available. The sustainability transparency that does exist is a thin layer over a tiny fraction of economic activity.
Building Coverage That Scales
Reaching SMEs requires different data strategies than those designed for public companies. Self-reported data alone won't work — small businesses don't have ESG teams. The path forward combines available public data (regulatory filings, energy procurement records, corporate registrations, industry certifications), sector-level benchmarks, and targeted verification. The resulting assessments will be approximate rather than exhaustive — but directionally accurate at scale, which is far more valuable than exhaustive coverage of a negligible fraction of the economy.
Susty's coverage model is designed from the start with this scale challenge in mind. Starting with the most-searched companies and expanding outward systematically, using methodologies that can be applied without requiring a dedicated sustainability function on the company side. The goal is a world where any company, of any size, has a sustainability score — and any consumer can find it.