SESAMm is pleased to announce that Nathalie Wallace is joining our Advisory Board. Nathalie brings more than 20 years of experience at the intersection of investment management, sustainability strategy, and executive leadership. She has built a career helping global investment organizations integrate sustainability into investment decision-making and capital allocation.

Commenting on the appointment, Sylvain Forté, CEO of SESAMm, said, “Nathalie brings a rare combination of investment experience, strategic vision, and deep understanding of how sustainability considerations translate into real-world investment decisions. Her perspective will be invaluable as SESAMm continues to support financial institutions navigating increasingly complex risk and regulatory environments.”

She previously served as Chief Sustainability Officer at Edmond de Rothschild, where she contributed to the firm’s sustainability strategy across asset classes. Prior to that, Nathalie was Global Head of Sustainable Investment at Natixis Investment Managers, where she was a member of the executive, investment, and seed committees, chaired the CSR–Sustainable Investment committee, and served on the boards of Mirova and Ostrum Asset Management. Earlier in her career, she was Global Head of Strategy and Business Development at Mirova, supporting its growth and positioning as a leading sustainable investment platform.

As Senior Advisor to SESAMm, Nathalie will support the company’s strategic direction, bringing her perspective on sustainable finance, investor expectations, and the evolving role of data and AI in risk analysis and investment processes.

“SESAMm’s approach to risk and sustainability intelligence reflects how investment teams are evolving their processes,” said Nathalie Wallace. “I’m excited to contribute my perspective as the firm continues to support investors with timely, decision-relevant insights.”

We are delighted to welcome Nathalie to SESAMm and look forward to working together as we continue to support financial institutions with forward-looking risk and sustainability insights.

SESAMm’s AI Technology Reveals ESG Insights

Discover unparalleled insights into ESG controversies, risks, and opportunities across industries. Learn more about how SESAMm can help you analyze millions of private and public companies using AI-powered text analysis tools.

The educational technology (EdTech) sector, including companies like Udemy, Coursera, and Byju's, has grown rapidly but faces major social and governance challenges. Key issues include costly legal battles over privacy violations and deceptive practices, which raise investor concerns. Financial instability is also prevalent, with layoffs and bankruptcies highlighting doubts about workforce rights and sustainable business models. While some companies manage ESG issues better, operational inefficiencies remain a concern for long-term stability.
What are the most pressing ESG challenges currently facing the EdTech sector? Read to find out.

BYJU’S: Treading Turbulent Waters Amidst Financial and Regulatory Challenges

Byju’s, an EdTech startup in India, has faced significant challenges since 2022. The company has dealt with controversies, including data breaches, financial mismanagement, and regulatory investigations. Key issues include the shutdown of its Kerala office, mass layoffs, allegations of Goods and Services Tax evasion, and defaults on loan payments. In 2023 and 2024, Byju's continued to struggle with layoffs, money laundering investigations, and the resignation of executives. As of 2024, the company is at risk of insolvency, with ongoing bankruptcy proceedings and regulatory action against its leadership, highlighting its financial instability after years of rapid growth.

Key Controversies:

• Congress MP Karti Chidambaram urges SFIO to probe Byju's finances
• Byju's shuts down Kerala office, forces employees to resign
• India Raids Byju’s Offices in Money Laundering Probe
• Byju's Lays Off Over 1,000 Employees, 2nd Mass Job Cut In A Year
• Byju's US Unit Files For Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Amid Financial Turmoil

Udemy: Battling Legal and Ethical Challenges in the E-Learning Landscape

Udemy, a leading e-learning platform, has encountered increasing legal, financial, and operational challenges. These include a settlement over deceptive pricing practices, antitrust issues leading to a board member's resignation, and multiple lawsuits related to Facebook data sharing and video privacy violations. The company has also restructured its workforce to streamline operations and faced concerns over its generative AI policy regarding consent and transparency among instructors. These controversies highlight the complexities faced by EdTech companies in navigating legal and ethical challenges.

Key Controversies:

• Udemy Agrees to Pay $4 Million Settlement Over Deceptive Pricing Practices
• Udemy Board Member Resigns Due to Antitrust Concerns by Justice Department
• Udemy Faces Lawsuits Over Facebook Data Sharing
• Udemy class action over violations of the Video Privacy Protection Act
• Generative AI policy at Udemy raises consent and transparency concerns
• Massive E-Learning Platform Udemy Gave Teachers a Gen AI 'Opt-Out Window'. It's Already Over.

Coursera: Navigating Challenges in Security, Ethics, and Workforce Dynamics

Coursera, another widely used online learning platform, has faced relatively few controversies as reflected by its Controversy Exposure Score. However, a few noteworthy challenges include security vulnerabilities, AI use, an investigation into misleading financial statements, and workforce reductions due to declining growth. The company is dealing with a class action lawsuit over subscription renewals and a data privacy lawsuit for sharing customer viewing history with Meta. Coursera also faces controversies related to AI, in this case on AI-powered tools for grading, providing feedback, and course-building, promising greater efficiency but raising questions about transparency and ethics. Finally, as part of restructuring, Coursera plans to cut its global workforce.

Key Controversies:

• Investigation for potential violations of securities laws related to misleading financial statements
• Coursera reducing workforce to counter declining growth
• Coursera Hit With Class Action Over Subscription Renewals
• Coursera data privacy class action lawsuit
• Coursera Faces Video Privacy Class Action Lawsuits

Conclusion

Each of these companies illustrates the growing ESG challenges in the EdTech sector. From maintaining data privacy and ethical AI use to ensuring sound governance, financial sustainability, and fair treatment of employees and customers, Udemy, Coursera, and BYJU’S all face heightened scrutiny. Recent controversies and operational troubles highlight the need for robust risk management as education technology firms mature on the global stage. The ESG risks – whether legal, social, or governance-related – not only threaten their reputations but also have material impacts on their long-term viability. By addressing these issues transparently and proactively, EdTech companies can work toward a more sustainable and responsible growth trajectory in the years ahead.

Reach out to SESAMm

TextReveal’s web data analysis of over five million public and private companies is essential for keeping tabs on ESG investment risks. To learn more about how you can analyze web data or to request a demo, reach out to one of our representatives.

SESAMm is proud to announce the launch of our latest solution: TextReveal® ESG Alerts. TextReveal ESG Alerts identifies ESG risks¹ and positive impact coverage² in over 100 languages by tracking mentions of your entire portfolio across 20 billion historical articles with millions of new ones added daily in near real-time.

¹ Inspired by SASB and other major standards.
² Based on UN SDGs.

Why use TextReveal ESG Alerts for your portfolio

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) ratings have become a conventional measure of a company’s risk against those business areas. They are also increasingly critical as legislation and stakeholders focus on sustainability, positive impact initiatives, and corporate social responsibility (CSR). So with the practice of ESG rating, investors have been able to use those scores to make decisions about their portfolios. Of course, investors are committed to a greener future, too.

Unfortunately, traditional ESG ratings come with challenges. For example, according to Andrew McLaughlin, a contributor to The Globe and Mail, many ESG rating providers are “popping up like dandelions,” and “each uses its own methodologies to rank and score publicly traded companies based on their purported environmental, social and governance risk and performance.” Further, you might have access to ratings, but they’re only updated once per quarter or once yearly.

With SESAMm’s TextReveal ESG Alerts, you can access consistent, timely daily data on five million public and private companies to better assess risks and receive early warnings.

The model can calculate sentiment for each company by analyzing the news of individual companies. It’s also possible to create a composite to measure the sentiment related to a stock index. The sentiment data also helps management and investor relations because it provides a quantitative means of understanding the extent to which investors are concerned about certain news about their company.

Verifying the results

Verification using Japanese has revealed that the timing of bottoming and ceiling of text sentiment precedes those of stock prices. The collaborating team compared the performance of:

• A model that uses only orthodox financial and economic data as inputs
• A model that considers NLP and financial and economic data, confirming that the latter could generate higher alpha

The TextReveal ESG Alerts edge

Broad coverage

Access five million private and public companies of all sizes, including micro-caps, to identify risks in over 100 languages.

Expertise

Leverage ninety pre-built yet taxonomy-adaptable ESG risk categories such as SASB standards, UN Global Compact, and UN SDG-based positive impact statistics coverage.

Transparency

Gain insights with deeper analysis, seeing specific articles driving your alerts.

Timeliness

View live web data for forward-looking scores and insights.

TextReveal ESG Alerts features

Because we trained them on a representative corpus selected from billions of articles from prestigious news organizations, local news, and discussion forums, our NLP tools can understand finance and interpret slang, misspellings, and textspeak.

Read more:

• “What Investors Ought to Know About Natural Language Processing: A Quick Guide”
• “What Investors Ought to Know About Knowledge Graphs: The Core of Text Analysis”
• “What Investors Ought to Know About Data Lakes: A Quick Guide”

The best part is that you can receive alerts and monitor scores in the way that works best for you. ESG and UN SDG‐based positive impact statistics can be accessed and delivered via:

Email Alerts

CRM and cloud based integration

Live dashboards

API and data files

ESG studies

Get the SESAMm edge from TextReveal ESG Alerts

Save time vetting your current investments and evaluating new ones while providing higher quality, objective results compared with manual monitoring, black-box ratings, or self-reported questionnaires.

Reach out to a SESAMm representative for a personal demo today.