ESG Lighthouse
From Market Gap to Acquisition in 8 Months: Building an AI-Powered B2B SaaS
Identifying a compliance gap created by new EU regulations and the lack of affordable tooling for SMEs, I developed ESG Lighthouse as a solo founder. In just eight months, I designed, built, and launched an AI-powered SaaS MVP that automated CSRD reporting. The platform was validated with pilot customers and the codebase was subsequently acquired by a sustainability-tech vendor.
The Problem: A Compliance Crisis for SMEs
The EU's new CSRD regulation created a massive, underserved market. While large corporations had dedicated teams and six-figure software budgets, SMEs faced the same complex reporting burden with no viable tools.
The SME Compliance Nightmare
SMEs were drowning in over 1,200 new data points and faced weeks of manual, error-prone work searching through hundreds of documents to meet audit requirements.
The Enterprise-Only Tooling
Existing compliance platforms started at €50,000+ annually and required expensive consultants, making them completely inaccessible for SMEs with budgets under €10,000.
My Role: Solo Founder & End-to-End Product Leader
Led ESG Lighthouse from concept to successful technology exit, covering responsibilities across product, engineering, and go-to-market.
Market Discovery & Validation
Analyzed the 1,200-page CSRD legislation and conducted interviews with 15+ SMEs to confirm pain points. Identified a €250M total addressable market for an AI-first compliance solution.
Product Strategy & AI Architecture
Defined the product vision for an AI-powered platform to democratize compliance. Architected a serverless, multi-tenant SaaS with a custom RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) pipeline using GPT-4 for document intelligence.
Full-Stack Development & Deployment
Built the full platform end-to-end, including a Next.js frontend, FastAPI/Python backend, and the RAG engine. Set up CI/CD pipelines on Vercel, enabling production deployments in under 10 minutes.
Go-to-Market & Customer Validation
Closed two paying pilot customers (Belgian manufacturers) at €1,500/year. Onboarded users, iterated on the MVP through feedback, and achieved a 60% reduction in their reporting time, confirming product-market fit.
Strategic Exit & Technology Transfer
Led acquisition discussions, managed technical due diligence, and negotiated the asset purchase agreement. Completed full code and knowledge transfer with the acquiring sustainability software vendor.
The Solution: An AI Co-Pilot for Sustainability Reporting
Key interfaces demonstrating AI-powered CSRD compliance automation
AI-Powered Dashboard
Provided SMEs with a real-time, centralized workspace to track compliance progress across 1,200+ data points, replacing chaotic spreadsheets.
RAG Document Analysis
Eliminated weeks of manual work by using an AI-powered RAG engine to automatically extract paragraph-level evidence with source citations from company documents, ensuring every claim was audit-ready.
Technical Architecture
A modern, serverless architecture optimized for AI workloads and multi-tenant SaaS delivery, designed to deliver enterprise-grade performance at an SME-friendly cost.
Core Technologies
Advanced AI/RAG Pipeline
Custom RAG implementation using OpenAI GPT-4 and vector embeddings for context-aware semantic search across millions of paragraphs, with intelligent caching to reduce API costs by 40%.
Multi-Tenant Data Layer
MongoDB with Prisma ORM and row-level security provided complete tenant data isolation, essential for a secure B2B SaaS product.
Automated DevOps
Vercel CI/CD with automated testing achieved zero-downtime deployments in under 10 minutes, enabling rapid iteration based on pilot customer feedback.
Platform Demos
Landing Page & App Demo • Live Platform
Experience the AI-powered CSRD compliance platform that achieved successful market validation and technology acquisition.
View Project Source Code on Github
Private Repository • View on Github
Full source code available for technical review upon request. Contains AI/RAG implementations and multi-tenant SaaS architecture.
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