The LSE Directory / Alternative data
SESAMm is a Paris headquartered AI and natural language processing company that turns unstructured web text, news articles, NGO reports, court filings, blogs and social media into structured risk signals on companies. Its core product, TextReveal, processes more than 30 billion documents drawn from over 4 million public and premium sources in 100 or more languages, covering upward of 5 million public and private companies. The platform is delivered as an API or a web dashboard and generates alerts across several risk categories: ESG risk, reputational and KYC risk, supplier and supply chain risk, legal risk (litigation and investigations), and regulatory and compliance risk. A newer "AI Agents" product uses large language models to generate structured due diligence reports on demand for any company in its coverage. SESAMm's specialisation is early detection of ESG controversies and reputational events, using large language models fine tuned on proprietary, human annotated datasets built up over more than a decade of text data. It positions itself against both traditional ESG rating agencies, which it says lag mainstream sources, and against broader market intelligence platforms by emphasising multilingual coverage and non-English source depth, real time monitoring rather than periodic scoring, and coverage that extends beyond listed companies into private companies and sub-tier suppliers that conventional ESG datasets typically exclude. Its customer base spans private equity firms, asset managers, commercial and investment banks, insurers, and corporate legal, compliance and supply chain teams, rather than only traditional buy side quant desks. The company was founded in 2014 in Paris by three co-founders, Sylvain Forte (CEO), Pierre Rinaldi (COO) and Florian Aubry (CTO), starting with roughly 1 million euros of initial funding. It expanded to the US in 2017, launched its ESG product line and opened New York and Tunis offices in 2019, opened a Tokyo office in 2021 alongside a 7.5 million euro Series B1 round led by The Carlyle Group, and closed a 35 million euro Series B2 round in March 2023, co-led by deep tech VC firm Elaia and Opera Tech Ventures, the venture arm of BNP Paribas, with participation from Unigestion, Raiffeisen Bank International's Elevator Ventures, AFG Partners, CEGEE Capital and existing backers including Carlyle and New Alpha Asset Management. That round brought total funding raised to roughly 50 million euros. SESAMm now operates offices in Paris, Metz, New York, London, Tokyo and Tunis, and lists clients and partners including The Carlyle Group, BNP Paribas, Natixis, Tokio Marine and Raiffeisen Bank International. In September 2025, SESAMm announced a data partnership with corporate risk intelligence provider Sayari, integrating SESAMm's real time AI generated controversy risk data into Sayari's supply chain platform (API, bulk export, Sayari Graph and Sayari Map), extending monitoring to roughly 650,000 suppliers, including private, sub-tier entities not typically covered by conventional ESG datasets.
