Why We Started Annwn

We believe the sustainability profession has the most dedicated and passionate leaders in industry. We also believe they can play a much bigger role. They should be pivotal in the innovative work required to build resilience and create commercial value. The businesses they serve need sustainability to deliver on both, and the world needs those businesses to get it right.

And while we believe this profession isn't yet equipped to do that job at the scale the moment demands, that is about to change.

A range of AI and related technologies have reached a maturity that can transform businesses. They can now fundamentally improve our effectiveness and overcome the enormous complexity and scale of the task faced by sustainability professionals. That is the reason we have started Annwn.

Between us, the founding team has more than fifty years of experience in solving sustainability problems. We also helped people with the sustainability software now prevalent across the sector. We have spent our careers watching brilliant professionals spending too much time on work that brings too little value. We understand, painfully, why so much strategic potential gets missed.

With our knowledge of the industry and deep connections to it, we have decided to back our convictions, and seek to bridge this gap, with our own money and effort, and time.

Annwn is a new category of product, one that works with you and will alter your perception of what’s achievable.

Sustainability increasingly touches most parts of a modern business: supply chains, energy, capital allocation, regulatory exposure, reputation. In many respects it is best positioned to be a source of competitive advantage. In practice, it too often ends up on the sidelines with too much of peoples’ time producing reports that satisfy regulators and then get filed away.

The work falls to small teams and consultants, juggling fragmented data and shifting frameworks, largely by hand. It is expensive, slow, and fragile. When people move on, hard-won knowledge goes with them.

The economics have shifted too. The recent period of growing sustainability teams and bold public commitments has given way to tighter budgets, regulatory compliance, and a new pressure to demonstrate returns.

In Europe, the regulatory burden itself is being scaled back following the omnibus review. What remains is a harder, more practical agenda: compliance, risk management, operational efficiency and resilience, with fewer resources to deliver it. There is more to do than ever, with tougher constraints on the time and money available.

We have now reached a pivotal moment: new technologies have become materially more capable and the pressure on sustainability teams to deliver is approaching breaking point.

Annwn is designed to be the app sustainability professionals have never had but wish they had, helping them deliver their work every day.

Our goal is to help them spend more time on the work that actually changes things, to spend their time making a difference (as the cliché goes).

First, we really will take the manual work off your plate, orchestrating everything needed to get the job done. Finding data across messy and inconsistent sources, crunching emissions numbers, reconciling regulatory frameworks, coordinating contributors, drafting disclosures and reports. Work that currently takes weeks, reduced to hours, with a clear audit trail showing how each conclusion was reached. The initial functionality we’re building will tackle the 'daily grind' and it will include disclosures, RFP's, questionnaires, compliance / regulations, and data management. CDP is already live.

In the process of doing that work, Annwn captures, codifies and connects the knowledge that usually lives in people’s heads: which sources were used, what methodology was applied, who made which decisions and why, the business context that sits behind the sustainability data. Every engagement makes the system smarter, meaning the value of the knowledge compounds over time. Each project builds on what came before rather than starting from scratch.

This is where things get exciting. Once Annwn understands an enterprise deeply, its operations, its risks, its data, it can start to join the dots that couldn’t be joined before; recommending new actions and providing the scaffold to execute them. It can surface unseen opportunities to cut emissions, reduce operational risk, or build new propositions, identifying where sustainability connects to commercial value. Helping the profession move from reporting on the past to building the value of the future.

We believe the team we have brought together is unusually well placed. We built Avieco to a team of seventy, with competences across the sustainability brief. When we were acquired by Accenture we then led their practice. We’ve previously raised significant startup funding, hired large numbers of people, worked with thousands of businesses on their sustainability goals, and know what it’s like to grow at pace. We have deep relationships across the sustainability landscape. We understand both the domain and the technology, and we know what great looks like because we have spent decades doing this work ourselves.

Sustainability professionals are carrying one of the most consequential briefs in business. We built Annwn because we believe the right technology, in the right hands, can finally give them the leverage to make things happen.

If you work in sustainability, particularly in-house teams, or anywhere across the profession, we would welcome a conversation. We have a great group of initial customers and are looking for a couple more as our initial Development Partners. The more we understand how we can help you, the better we will build it.

Please drop your details through the form in 'Request Early Access' and we will be in touch. Ben, Adam, Rory and Ben