SESAMm
SESAMm is an AI risk-intelligence platform that turns large-scale web data into ESG controversy, reputational, KYC and supplier-risk signals for investors, banks and insurers. The vendor claims coverage of 5M+ companies in 100+ languages.
What is SESAMm?
SESAMm is an AI platform that turns large-scale web data into structured risk signals: ESG controversies, reputational and KYC exposure, and supply-chain risk. It is built for institutional investors, banks, insurers, corporates and law firms, and it frames its own job as making risk assessable from evidence, with every score pointing back to the cases and documents behind it.
The scale figures below are the vendor's own and have not been independently audited. SESAMm says it analyses more than 30 billion documents drawn from over 4 million public and premium sources in more than 100 languages, adding roughly 10 million documents a day, and that it covers over 5 million public and private companies. Its knowledge base repeats the same order of magnitude, citing around 30,000 premium sources.
Two modules sit on top of that data lake. Event Monitoring aggregates articles into Events and Events into Cases, attaches an Intensity Score to each event, and rolls the whole thing up into the Controversy Exposure Score, a 0-100 company score refreshed daily. AI Reports produces due-diligence documents on demand across several families: ESG Assessment, Deal Screening, Legal Risk, Supply Chain Screening, Secondaries & Credit Screening, and Good Governance for SFDR. Screening maps onto the SFDR, CSRD and UN Global Compact frameworks, with sanctions and restricted-sector filters alongside.
The Controversy Exposure Score is more than a vendor metric: SESAMm presents it as a regulated ESG rating under Regulation (EU) 2024/3005, with a methodology published as a PDF, a complaints policy and a channel for reasoned concerns. The company also claims human oversight on top of the models, with a team of analysts running daily quality checks before delivery.
Behind the product is SESAMm S.A.S., a French simplified joint-stock company with share capital of EUR 121,002.20, headquartered at 7 Boulevard Solidarité in Metz under SIREN 802024737. It was founded in 2014 by three students, co-founders Sylvain Forté (CEO), Pierre Rinaldi (COO) and Florian Aubry (CTO), and now lists offices in Metz, Paris, New York, London, Tokyo and Tunis. Its TextReveal® and SignalReveal® trademarks are registered in Europe and the United Kingdom, and named clients on the site include Allianz Commercial, The Carlyle Group, Raiffeisen Bank International, Caisse d’Epargne Rhône Alpes and Sustainable Fitch.
What it does
- Detect ESG controversies on a public or private company in near real time.
- Score controversy exposure with the Controversy Exposure Score, a 0-100 company-level rating refreshed daily.
- Screen an entire portfolio against exclusion lists, sanctions and norms such as SFDR and the UN Global Compact.
- Generate a structured due-diligence report on any company in under 30 minutes.
- Map and monitor supplier risk across an extended supply chain.
- Receive daily email alerts on the risk events that matter to your book.
- Feed risk data into your own systems through the Live Risk API or a flat-file export.
When to use SESAMm / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if SESAMm is the right fit.
When to use SESAMm
- ESG and sustainability analysts at private equity firms and asset managers who screen portfolios and pipelines for controversies, including in unlisted companies that mainstream rating providers cover thinly.
- Compliance, KYC and AML teams running adverse-media, sanctions and counterparty checks on prospective clients.
- Insurance underwriters after an automated risk check at quotation stage, the workflow SESAMm documents in its Allianz Commercial case study.
- Procurement and third-party risk managers mapping and monitoring an extended supply chain.
- Deal and data teams in M&A, secondaries and private credit who want a screening read before the data room, and who can pipe the Live Risk API, a flat-file export or a Snowflake share into their own stack.
When not to use SESAMm
- Individuals and small businesses. There is no self-service sign-up, no published price and no free tier: the only way in is a demo request form.
- Anyone who needs to buy quickly and predictably. Access runs through a sales conversation and a contract, and even the API response schema is described as subject to contractual configuration.
- Teams looking for carbon accounting, life-cycle assessment or internal CSRD reporting. SESAMm scores external controversies; it does not compile your own footprint.
- Mobile-first users. There is no iOS or Android app, and no App Store or Google Play listing anywhere on the site.
- Competing ESG rating, data, analytics and advisory providers, who are explicitly refused the rated-entity access offered under Regulation (EU) 2024/3005.
How to use SESAMm
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Request a demonstration through the Get a Demo form. There is no self-service sign-up, so this is the only entry point.
- Once the commercial agreement is in place, SESAMm opens the account and sends a password-creation email; the link stays valid for 48 hours.
- Set your interface language in Account Settings. Japanese, French, German and Spanish are cited alongside English, and automatic article translation can be switched on from the same place.
- Search for a company by name in the search bar, then confirm the entity using the description, website and identifiers shown next to it.
- If the company is missing from coverage, use the "Ask SESAMm to add entity to your coverage" button.
- Open Case Monitoring to read the AI summary of controversies, follow the Controversy Exposure Score over time, and drill from Cases into Events and then into the individual Articles.
- Upload a portfolio, one name at a time or in bulk, to monitor a whole book rather than a single company.
- Turn on daily email alerts so that key risk events reach you without opening the dashboard.
- For a document you can circulate, submit a company name and an email address in AI Reports; the report arrives by email in under 30 minutes.
- To industrialise, call the Live Risk API with up to 150 legal identifiers per request (LEI, ISIN, local identifiers, DUNS, or name plus country as a fallback) and read the JSON back, take a flat-file export or a Snowflake share, or connect the MCP server, which SESAMm says takes under five minutes to set up and lets you save recurring queries as shareable Skills.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Coverage claimed at a scale far beyond the comparables SESAMm itself lists: 5M+ companies against 300,000 for RepRisk and 260,000 for FactSet Truvalue Labs, according to the vendor's own comparison page.
- Reaches unlisted companies and infrastructure projects, which is precisely where conventional rating providers thin out.
- The Controversy Exposure Score is a regulated ESG rating under Regulation (EU) 2024/3005, with a published PDF methodology, an Article 19 complaints policy and an Article 20 channel for reasoned concerns: an unusual degree of procedural accountability for an AI vendor.
- Traceability is built in. Each conclusion links back to the source articles behind it, with audit trails, and SESAMm says analysts run daily quality checks on top of the models.
- Linguistic depth: 100+ languages according to SESAMm, with claimed access to local sources across Europe, Asia and emerging markets.
- Several ways in rather than one: web dashboard, daily email alerts, the Live Risk API, flat-file export, Snowflake Secure Data Sharing and an MCP server, plus due-diligence reports produced in under 30 minutes.
- Client references are named and quoted with role and employer, including Allianz Commercial, The Carlyle Group, Raiffeisen Bank International and Sustainable Fitch.
Cons
- No public pricing whatsoever: no pricing page, no figure, not even an order of magnitude, and no documented free plan or free trial. The single "Request Your Free Trial" button left on a 2024 blog post in fact leads to the demonstration form.
- No terms and conditions are published anywhere, even though the Regulatory Disclosures page refers twice to "our Terms of Use".
- SESAMm offers no data processing agreement of its own. The only DPA linked from the site is HubSpot's, that of a processor.
- The privacy policy dates from 18 October 2022 and covers only website data. Nothing is said about how customer data inside the platform is processed.
- No security certification is published, neither SOC 2 nor ISO 27001, and there is no documented way to keep your data out of model training.
- No public support address: the knowledge base points you to "your Account Manager". There is no mobile app on either store either.
- Housekeeping errors on the site itself, which is not reassuring on a data product: two different postcodes for the same Metz head office (57000 in the privacy policy, 57070 on the Regulatory Disclosures and About pages), structured data on the About page publishing three social links that return 404, and a founding date in that same structured data which the company's own blog contradicts. The competitive comparison table is also written by SESAMm.
Pricing & Plans
SESAMm publishes no price. There is no pricing page, no plan, no rate card and no starting amount anywhere across the pages reviewed; the only monetary figures on the site are the company's own funding rounds. No free plan and no free trial are documented either. Commercial access is by sales contact only: every call to action leads to a demonstration request form, and the API documentation states that the response schema is subject to contractual configuration, which indicates that scope, and therefore price, is negotiated contract by contract. Prospective buyers should expect a quotation rather than a published tariff.
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how SESAMm handles your data.
GDPR overview
GDPR here is handled structurally rather than proclaimed. The privacy policy of 18 October 2022 is laid out section by section against the regulation, with dedicated parts on definitions, principles, data subject rights, information, processing, sharing, security, cookies and contact, and a consent banner is presented as a GDPR obligation for visitor tracking. A data protection officer is designated at dpo@sesamm.com. As a French company, SESAMm is established inside the EU, so no Article 27 representative is required and none is named. Two caveats: the site never writes the words "GDPR compliant" anywhere, so compliance is read from the structure of the policy rather than claimed; and SESAMm publishes no data processing agreement of its own, the only DPA linked from the site being HubSpot's, that of a processor. Separately, SESAMm is registered as an ESG rating provider under Regulation (EU) 2024/3005.
Who owns the data?
The published privacy policy, last modified on 18 October 2022, names SESAMm S.A.S., 7 Boulevard Solidarité in Metz, as the controller for the personal data it covers, with a data protection officer reachable at dpo@sesamm.com. Data subjects are granted the full set of GDPR rights: information, access, rectification, erasure, restriction, objection, including objection to automated processing and profiling, portability, complaint and withdrawal of consent. One limit matters most: the policy addresses only personal data collected through the website and through marketing communications. It says nothing about who owns or controls the customer data handled inside the platform itself.
Reuse rights
The privacy policy of 18 October 2022 sets out its purposes plainly: delivering the service, meeting a legal or contractual obligation, identifying users, sending tailored offers under legitimate interest, sending newsletters with consent, and measuring how long a visit lasts. It also reserves the right to reuse anonymised data outside the scope of the policy, and it states that personal data is not shared with strangers. Named third parties do get access in the course of those purposes: Greenhouse for recruitment, HubSpot for CRM, CMS and mailing, UserGuiding for product onboarding (name and email), Amplitude for product analytics (names, emails and company names) and Google Analytics. What the site never addresses is the end user's side of the bargain. No published document says whether you may reuse, redistribute or republish the scores, cases and reports the platform produces, because no terms of use are published at all, even though the Regulatory Disclosures page refers to them. That question has to be settled in the contract. The raw material behind the product is itself public web content: premium news, NGO sites, forums and corporate websites. Whether customer data is used to train models is not addressed anywhere, in either direction.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
The only hosting statement anywhere on the site sits in the legal block at the top of the privacy policy: the site is hosted by OVH, at 2 rue Kellermann, 59100 Roubaix, France. Read it for what it is, because that sentence covers the marketing website, not the platform. SESAMm publishes nothing about where the data behind Event Monitoring, AI Reports or the Live Risk API is stored, and no data residency commitment appears anywhere. There is no mention of AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, and no EU, US or APAC region is named. What is disclosed is the list of named processors with access to personal data collected through the site: Greenhouse, HubSpot, UserGuiding, Amplitude and Google Analytics. On the technical side, our own checks show the site running on Webflow behind Cloudflare, which is an observation rather than a vendor disclosure. Jurisdiction, in short, is French by default because the publisher is French; it is not French by any hosting commitment you could hold SESAMm to.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting SESAMm.
- Treat the headline numbers as marketing until proven otherwise. The 5M+ companies, 30B+ documents, 4M+ sources and 100+ languages are SESAMm's own claims, published by SESAMm and audited by no one.
- The competitive comparison against RepRisk and FactSet Truvalue Labs sits on SESAMm's website and was written by SESAMm. It is a sales argument, not a benchmark.
- A score is a starting point, not a verdict. Automating an underwriting, exclusion or supplier decision on a 0-100 controversy score risks penalising a company for the volume of press coverage rather than for its actual conduct. The traceability back to source articles exists precisely so that a human reads them.
- You would be contracting blind on the legal side. No terms and conditions are published even though the Regulatory Disclosures page cites "our Terms of Use" twice, SESAMm offers no DPA of its own, and no security certification is published. Ask for all three in writing before signing.
- The privacy policy dates from 18 October 2022 and covers website visitors and marketing contacts only. It tells you nothing about what happens to the data you put into the platform, and nothing on the site says whether that data is used to train models.
- Beware the free-access mirage. The only "Free Trial" button on the site is an orphan on a 2024 blog post that leads to the demonstration form, and the free access announced on the Regulatory Disclosures page is for entities that are rated under the EU regulation, not for buyers of the tool. Competing ESG providers are explicitly excluded from it.
- Small inconsistencies suggest the site is not closely maintained: two different postcodes for the same Metz head office, and structured data on the About page carrying three social links that return 404 plus a founding date the company's own blog contradicts. Verify legal details against the company register rather than the website.
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Technically undemanding. Nothing is installed: the platform is a web application and SESAMm opens the account for you. First login is a password-creation email whose link lasts 48 hours, and setup amounts to choosing an interface language and switching on automatic article translation. The business path, meaning dashboard, email alerts, portfolio upload and the AI report form, needs no code. A technical path exists for teams that want it: the Live Risk API with LEI, ISIN or DUNS identifiers in batches of 150, flat-file export, Snowflake sharing and an MCP server. The real friction is commercial, not technical.
Deployment
Integrations
Supported languages
Behind SESAMm
Fundraising
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Alternatives
Tools that compete with or complement SESAMm.
Frequently asked questions
What does SESAMm do?
How much data does it cover, and in which languages?
What is the Controversy Exposure Score?
How much does SESAMm cost?
Is there a free trial or a free plan?
Is there an API?
Can I query SESAMm from an AI assistant?
Who publishes the tool?
Is the product GDPR compliant?
Where is the data hosted?
Should you pick SESAMm?
SESAMm is serious infrastructure rather than a light analytics toy. Founded in 2014 and more than a decade into the work, it serves named institutional clients, and its Controversy Exposure Score is a regulated ESG rating under Regulation (EU) 2024/3005, complete with a published methodology, a complaints policy and a channel for reasoned concerns. That regulatory footing is rare among AI risk vendors and it changes the nature of the product: there is a paper trail, and somewhere to go when you disagree with a score.
Its real strength is reach. Coverage of unlisted companies and infrastructure projects, plus text analysis across more than a hundred languages, addresses exactly where conventional ESG data thins out, although every one of those coverage figures comes from SESAMm itself and none has been independently audited, including the comparison table that sets it against RepRisk and FactSet Truvalue Labs on its own page.
The counterweight is commercial opacity. There is no price, no rate card, no terms and conditions, no trial and no self-service route in; the only door is a demonstration form followed by a contract. Product documentation genuinely exists and is good, but it lives on a knowledge base that is not linked from the site's navigation or its sitemap. The privacy policy dates from 2022 and covers the website alone.
The verdict: a strong fit for financial institutions and large corporates that already have a procurement process, and out of reach for everyone else. Budget for a sales cycle, and ask in writing for the terms of use, the data processing agreement and the security posture that the website does not publish.
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