SustainaCado - AI-Driven ESG Rating Platform

FINS5548 asked us to build and pitch a real fintech venture. I served as CFO of SustainaCado - an ESG rating platform for Australian SMEs - and that role taught me more about financial modelling under uncertainty than any textbook.

The core problem I came to understand: ESG tools like MSCI and Sustainalytics are built for listed corporations. Australia's 2.5 million SMEs are invisible to this infrastructure, locked out of green finance, dropped from supply chains, unable to meet increasingly downstream APRA climate disclosure requirements. That exclusion is structural and has real financial consequences.

As CFO, I designed a freemium-to-SaaS revenue model and stress-tested every conversion assumption. What I learned: building a financial model for a pre-revenue AI startup forces you to make every bet explicit. The projected gross profit of A$15M by FY2029 and the A$2.2M raise for 10% equity are only as credible as the market sizing and cost structure beneath them.

The technical side exposed me to ML architectures I hadn't worked with before - LayoutLMv3 for document parsing, FinBERT/BERT-CRF for real-time sentiment monitoring, and XGBoost as the fusion scoring layer. I didn't build these engines, but understanding them well enough to model their cost structure and market value was its own learning curve.

Key takeaway: pitch-stage finance is an exercise in structured honesty. Be clear about what you know, what you're assuming, and what you're betting on. The numbers only hold up when the reasoning behind them does.