In this episode of Sustainable Intelligence, we sit down with Wladimir Nikoluk, Novata’s Chief Product Officer and founder of Atlas Metrics, to explore how sustainability data is rapidly evolving and what it means for the future of private markets.
Wladimir traces his journey from the UN to McKinsey to launching Atlas Metrics, all fueled by one guiding question: How can data truly augment human decision-making in sustainability?
Together, we dig into what organizations need most right now: clear materiality, seamless data collection, trustworthy data quality, and insights that move far beyond compliance to reduce risk, unlock value, and inform smarter decisions.
About Sustainable Intelligence
Novata’s Sustainable Intelligence podcast brings honest, forward-thinking conversations about sustainability in the private markets. From carbon accounting to turning data into impact, each episode explores how investors and business leaders are tackling real challenges, meeting rising regulations, and building long-term value. Join us for expert insights, practical strategies, and authentic dialogue that empower action and progress in the evolving sustainability landscape. Listen to more episodes on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
Conversation with Wladimir Nikoluk (Transcript)
Ella Williamson: Welcome to Sustainable Intelligence, where we discuss all things sustainability for the private markets. Joining us today is Wladimir Nikoluk, Chief Product Officer here at Novata. Wlad’s career has spanned some of the world’s most influential organizations, from Goldman Sachs and McKinsey and Company to the United Nations Development Program, before he founded Atlas Metrics in 2021. Atlas Metrics quickly became one of Europe’s most innovative sustainability data platforms, and in October 2025, Novata officially acquired Atlas Metrics, marking an exciting new chapter in our shared mission to simplify sustainability around the world.
Wlad now joins Novata as our Chief Product Officer, where he’s leading the next phase of product innovation, integrating Atlas’s DNA into Novata’s broader platform to help organizations around the world make sustainability data truly work for them. We’ll be talking about his journey, the future of sustainability intelligence, and where he sees the biggest opportunities ahead. Now Wlad, great to have you here. I’d love you to start by telling us a bit about your career leading up to founding Atlas Metrics.
Wladimir Nikoluk: Thank you for having me, Ella. It’s great to be here with you. Yeah, my background is really at this intersection of sustainability and data science. I started basically with my bachelor’s degree focusing on philosophy, politics, and economics at Oxford. And then my first job was working for the United Nations, as you said on the Syria crisis response. It was a time where the crisis was really at its height. The UN was spending two and a half billion dollars per year to stabilize the countries surrounding Syria. I was part of a team trying to figure out how do you allocate this money across five countries and more than 10 sectors per country? And that question really quickly gets you to the question of how do social and environmental metrics change if you spend 400 million on health or 500 million on education?
And I then worked for McKinsey, a management consulting company. Started as a generalist consultant and ended up leading a lot of the data science and machine learning projects there, and fell in love with what data can do to augment human decision-making. I had this idea or this question around, what if you combine the data science progress we are making with this need to measure social and environmental performance? And yeah, I got lucky. I got a scholarship to go to Harvard for my master’s. Spent two years trying to understand how to do that, essentially studied machine learning, PhD level econometrics, started coding in Python myself, but also did impact investing, impact management. And out of all of these experiences came Atlas in ‘21.
Ella: Fascinating, and I love that piece you said about using data to augment human decision-making, and I think that probably part of what inspired you to originally build Atlas Metrics, but what were the real gaps you were aiming to fill in the sustainability space at the time?
Wlad: Yeah, I think the core insights that was driving the idea behind Atlas was that our world is changing ever more quickly. We started specifically focusing on environmental aspects of it around climate change. The logic is pretty, I would say, straightforward. We have a planet. The planet has planetary boundaries, and the sum of economic activities now regularly exceeds planetary boundaries, which causes the planet to change, which in turn causes risks and opportunities for organizations living and working within it.
And, we wanted to make those changes measurable, easy to understand, and actionable for customers we’re working with. And so Atlas was started with this goal in mind. And we then pretty quickly became a software that would track data beyond compliance because there was this parallel regulatory wave specifically in Europe, right? Where more and more standards were created in which the sustainability performance of banks, companies, and funds could be documented. And yeah, that really helped us grow very quickly across different countries and across different markets.
Ella: Planetary boundaries. That’s a very big phrase, but I love the fact that’s what you were looking to address, and tracking data beyond compliance is exactly where Novata has built its journey as well. So what have you learned on this journey in terms of what companies need to make sustainability data more actionable for their business and their industry?
Wlad: Yeah, I think there’s obviously different things to get right, but I would say the four things to focus on in my opinion are first, to help organizations understand what data points actually material to their business, right? Sustainability usually covers a huge range of domains and not all of those domains are equally important to a business. If you are producing clothes, you might be much more concerned about child labor and your supply chains than about the energy efficiency of your data centers, which is a core piece to focus on if you’re more of a technology company. So first of all, finding out what is material and making sure you track the right things.
Second, making data collection as easy as possible. That means for yourself and your own organization. That means for your supply chain, that means integrating into your systems. That means maybe filling out data where it’s not available for you, to make it as easy as possible.
Third, I think you want to make sure that the data you collect is actually correct and therefore useful. If you can basically quality assure the data points at the point of data entry maybe based on very meaningful benchmarks, that would tell you essentially about suspicious values, that’s something that is very important.
And lastly, you want to have this data that is useful for decision-making. So it should have some commercial value, it should help you maybe reduce your costs, right? Increase your revenues. Make sure that you can manage your risk and your supply chain or your portfolios. And ultimately you should engage with this data beyond an annual reporting process.
Ella: Really sound piece of advice there and definitely something that I will be adding to the transcript of this podcast so everyone can take it away. So now in your role as Chief Product Officer here at Novata—a big congratulations on that—what does the next 12 months look like for you and the product?
Wlad: Yeah. We’re starting off from a place of very significant complementarity, right, between what used to be Atlas and Novata. First of all, there’s of course this geographic complementarity between North America and Europe. Second, there’s a complementarity between the various markets that we can serve together, which now include banks, funds, and companies.
One of the key things for us to get right is a product strategy that can create an infrastructure on which all of those different types of organizations can generate, manage, and exchange sustainability data. And where we can not only enlarge our dominant position in terms of, maybe, compliance, right, and also sustainability data management, but also create more and more insights that are in the domain of value creation in the domain of management and essentially risk reduction. And if we can achieve those two things at the same time we will position ourselves for a very significant growth path going forward.
Ella: And I’m very excited to see that journey unfold. I know we have some exciting things ahead. We have seen the sustainability tech space specifically consolidating across Europe. What would you say that this specific acquisition means in terms of where this market is headed in 2026 and beyond?
Wlad: Yeah, we’ve seen in the last year’s very significant market entry into the domain. And I think it’s clear that consolidation is very desirable to also reach the objectives that all solution providers set out to achieve. Our customers will be looking for a reliable and proven solution on the one hand, yet a solution that is also agile and that can quickly adapt to what is fair to call a very quickly and very dynamic environment, right? We see regulatory changes. We see changes in standards. We see politically driven prioritization of sustainability topics. And so I think you need both, right?
You need to be big enough and sufficiently well resourced to be this reliable and trusted partner. But on the other hand, you need to innovate very quickly and stay nimble. And I think that’s what makes the joint entity so powerful because it has the perfect size to do both.
Ella: Size and agility. I love that. A very exciting way to frame what the future holds. And on the topic of the future, what do you think are the biggest opportunities or breakthroughs that sustainability teams may see in 2026?
Wlad: Yeah, I think sustainability teams will be pushed to concentrate on work beyond the traditional compliance domain. So if we look at the past years, people were busy establishing the first baselines for sustainability data collection. Meeting the requirements of various regulatory and non-regulatory standards, which could include something like the CSRD, the SFDR, GRI, ISSB, and there’s so many different acronyms and so many different ways in which the data can be reported.
We will see a move towards higher data quality and more focus on materiality, trying to understand which of those data points that were collected are actually material for business decision-making. And then I think ultimately we’ll see sustainability teams being pushed to show how they can generate value beyond compliance, right? How they can help manage supply chain risk, portfolio risk, help attract better talent, reduce the cost of capital. We will see a much closer focus on the relationship between financial and non-financial performance.
Ella: Absolutely, and I think that goes back to the four points you said earlier in terms of understanding what’s material to your business, making that data collection process really easy, ensuring the data quality so you can therefore understand what impact it’s having across your ecosystem, and then using the data to inform future decisions. So really nice tangent back to that question. In your career in sustainability, what would you say is the biggest learning you’ve had that you’d wish you could have known from the start?
Wlad: Probably the key learning is just how constant the rollercoaster is, and that you shouldn’t have this illusion that after the one challenge is solved that it’s gonna be smooth sailing. There’s gonna be constant levels of challenges and they’re always gonna be slightly different. But they’re gonna be consistent and I think you need to learn to be comfortable in this type of environment.
Ella: And I think that’s actually very reflective of the state of sustainability and how the sector and the space is maturing. So, amazing to hear your experience along that rollercoaster. Now we always finish these episodes with three quickfire questions. No right or wrong answers. What would you say is the most underrated skill for a founder, specifically in climate tech?
Wlad: Usually, I would say something like persistence or resilience is a key one for any entrepreneur. For climate tech specifically, I would also say the ability to not project your own normative perspective on the world, right? You might think that the world should be a certain way, but you need to build for the way the world is, including where market demand is coming from. And I think being always honest about that and having a sound commercial strategy is a key skill for a climate tech owner.
Ella: Yeah, that’s something that I keep hearing coming up, building for what’s ahead and where the gaps are rather than from potentially the experiences that you may have had. And number two, in one sentence, what makes a really great product team?
Wlad: I’d say customer obsession. We are dealing with complex topics. It’s easy to fall in love with the models and the data and the analytics and all of those things. But in the end of the day, our mission is to build a private markets infrastructure, which hundreds of thousands of companies can work, and that requires an understanding of user needs and building user journeys that would allow them to do that in an almost completely self-service type of way, and that requires that UX excellence and and an understanding of your customer that is exceptional.
Ella: Absolutely. That really resonates. And I would say actually customer obsession needs to be at the core of any business across every single team. So a really nice way to frame that. And finally, if you could time travel ahead to 2030, what would you hope to see from sustainability?
Wlad: My hope would be that we have established a very clear understanding of how sustainability performance and financial performance are related. And that we have, based on this understanding, enabled companies and banks and funds to consider sustainability in their strategies and in their day-to-day operations, and as a result, we’ve given the world or our market-based economies a way to operate within planetary boundaries to bring it back maybe to that. Because I think one of the things that are going, that is happening, is basically that we don’t have the data for the market to organically operate within planetary boundaries. And we need to give the market the data, and the insights to do so. And I think that could be one of the biggest impact contributions we make because it would constitute an upgrade of the economic system itself.
Ella: I love that. And thank you so much for all of the insight that you have shared today. I would say personally, my three key takeaways are, we know the world is changing quicker than ever, and we need data that can really augment human decision-making and enable you to have the insights you need to move your business forward. Number two, the real goal here is to generate, manage, and exchange sustainability data and in order to do that, you need a company that has the size, the reliability, but also is agile to move with the times. And finally, next year and beyond, it’s really about moving sustainability beyond traditional compliance. And that can be through many facets, which you’ve gone through. So thank you so much. And, until next time, let’s keep building sustainable intelligence together. Find out more at novata.com.
