Leise Sandeman

Disclaimer: This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability. Filler words were removed, and sentences were tightened while preserving the original meaning and conversational tone. Henry Harrison: I want to welcome Leise Sandeman to the show today. This is Entrepreneurs, Business, and Finance, and we’re fortunate to have you here. Thank goodness for Zoom and the World Wide Web because we’re going to talk about AI and what’s next, and you’re joining us all the way from Denmark. Welcome, Leise. Leise Sandeman: Hello. Thank you so much for having me. Henry Harrison: You’ve spent quite a lot of time in the U.S., but you’re originally from Denmark. How did you end up coming to the U.S.? You studied at Harvard and MIT. How did that journey start? Leise Sandeman: Like most people who end up somewhere different from where they were born, it looks like a straight line in hindsight, but it didn’t feel that way in real time. Denmark is a small northern European country, and my first time living outside it was for university. I moved to London after high school. The first move breaks the illusion that moving is impossible. You realize you can relocate almost anywhere if you create opportunities. After that, I already had my eyes on the U.S. If you want to build something and think about scale of change, the U.S. is a place where you can do things at a level that creates real impact. I was always in the sustainability space, so that mattered to me. It took about seven years after living outside Denmark before I applied to graduate school at Harvard and came across the pond. Henry Harrison: Your first work after college was in sustainability. Was that an interest in college, or did it become clearer later? Leise Sandeman: I always had the sustainability “bug,” but I also thought: it can’t be as hard as people make it sound. In academic institutions, sustainability and climate can feel inaccessible—almost like a specialized language. But it’s real, practical work. It’s a plant manager swapping out a fuel generator for an electric one. It’s changes people make every day. I started my career at McKinsey. From the start, I focused on the intersection of sustainability and business: how do you make progress in a way that also makes business sense? Henry Harrison: Do you remember a moment when you thought, “This is it—I want to focus on sustainability”? Leise Sandeman: I think the clarity came while I was at McKinsey. I worked with a major commercial and investment bank on underwriting strategy into real estate and infrastructure. They were trying to align their portfolio with the Paris Agreement, and as I looked at the numbers, I was shocked. A huge share of emissions comes from the built environment. That led me down the supply chain into materials. I spent time in mining—heavy equipment, water, waste, fuel—and then I moved to India to work with Tata Steel. I’m from Copenhagen, so standing in Jamshedpur and seeing steel as far as you could see—that was the moment. That was my point of no return. I realized this is what I want to work on long term. Henry Harrison: What were you interested in as a kid? Did you think you’d come to America and build a company? Leise Sandeman: I was a nerdy child. Proudly nerdy. I think being nerdy is obsessively enjoying something and meeting other people who enjoy it too. But I didn’t think I could start a business. My dad is an artist. My mom is a psychologist. Entrepreneurship wasn’t really part of the conversation in my family, and I didn’t have immediate role models. And honestly, I didn’t see many women in entrepreneurship either. So it didn’t feel like an obvious path. What I did love was organizing games at recess—coming up with worlds and getting everyone to play along. For a while I thought I might be a writer or a teacher, because those were examples I understood. Henry Harrison: It’s been about a year and a half since you founded the company. Explain what you do—without the jargon. Leise Sandeman: Look around the room you’re in: paint on the wall, the window, the chair, the steel beams, the concrete foundation. Anyone who makes those materials—steel, cement, glass, paint—could be a customer. At Pathways.io, we generate what’s called the product-level footprint. For the window you’re looking at, what was the environmental footprint of producing it? For people with a finance background, think of it like environmental capex. It’s not the emissions from using the product, it’s the emissions created during production. Traditionally, this has been done manually—slowly and expensively—often by consultants. Pathways automates what used to be manual. We also automate the boring part of sustainability. No one gets excited about collecting utility bills and water bills or tracking electricity by meter. Even people who care about sustainability don’t love that work. Henry Harrison: How did you and your co-founder come together? Leise Sandeman: My co-founder Alex is brilliant. I came to the U.S. and went to Harvard partly because I knew I couldn’t do this alone. For me, building a company is a team sport. Alex and I met at MIT in a class on entrepreneurship taught by Bill Aulet—Disciplined Entrepreneurship. From the start we felt values-aligned. We care about the planet and the people we work with. We value transparency. We were also willing to do the unglamorous work—because building a company usually isn’t glamorous. It’s hard and messy. We started as more of a project, checking in monthly, giving feedback, and letting it grow from there. Henry Harrison: A theme I hear from guests is mentorship. Has that mattered in your journey? Leise Sandeman: It’s foundational. It’s hard to do this alone. Early on, I needed people who believed I could do it. Not always one specific piece of advice—just real belief and encouragement. I also had friends who started companies and became informal mentors. Today, my biggest mentors are investors—people you can call when things are complex. I’m grateful for that support. Henry Harrison: Talk about funding. How did you approach venture capital? Leise Sandeman: We’re a classic venture-backed startup. We knew we’d have upfront costs building software. We built our own proprietary codebase, and that requires capital. Raising money can feel opaque, but a lot of it is a numbers game. If you talk to two investors, your odds are low. If you talk to many and get “no” from everyone, something needs to change—either the business or how you’re telling the story. We raised our first round in December 2023. We also had a high bar on who we wanted: investors who understand manufacturers and the built environment, and who understand selling into large enterprises. We were fortunate to be oversubscribed, which gave us flexibility to choose the right partners. Henry Harrison: Are you in market now with real customers? Leise Sandeman: Yes. A year ago it was mostly a good idea. Now we have real software deployed with customers, generating life cycle assessments and helping them operate faster and with less internal burden. We earned trust by meeting people, building credibility, and piloting. Start small, show value, then scale. We serve a range—from ready-mix concrete operations to manufacturers with 50+ sites across North America. Henry Harrison: Why do companies need to measure this now? Is it regulation, market pressure, or something else? Leise Sandeman: In my view, regulation drives most of it because this work is new, costly, and complex. In the U.S., you have Buy Clean policies in multiple states and federal momentum. You have real estate companies that need certifications and therefore need supplier documentation. And you have major buyers like Meta, Amazon, and Google pushing requirements—especially for data centers. If you manufacture materials and want to sell into those growing segments, you need environmental product declarations and related documentation. Henry Harrison: So what’s the pitch to a manufacturer? Leise Sandeman: This isn’t new data. Companies already have most of it. To create an environmental product declaration you need three things: input materials, transport, and your manufacturing process. Most of this already exists inside the company’s systems. Someone pays for the water. Someone tracks electricity. Operations tracks process data. We build APIs into their systems, and our AI restructures and standardizes the data so it can be used. Our engineers tell me it can take 30 to 45 seconds to pull the data once the integration is set. Henry Harrison: What are you focused on next? Leise Sandeman: We’re building the data layer for sustainable manufacturing. Buildings are like Lego: to understand the footprint of the full building, you need the footprint of each brick. We generate insight at the “brick” level. We’re early, but we’re proud of what we’ve built and where it’s heading. We’re focused on product development, serving customers well, and scaling. If anyone listening knows material manufacturers who are struggling with sustainability reporting or footprinting, we always appreciate warm introductions. Henry Harrison: Do customers typically save money? Leise Sandeman: Most do. They often pay consultants tens of thousands of dollars, and we reduce that need. But the bigger cost is internal time—asking plant teams to spend 30 hours tracking and assembling data manually. That’s where the largest savings come from. And there’s also revenue upside: sales and marketing teams can use this data to sell into new requirements and buyer expectations. Most companies prefer revenue impact over cost savings, and I agree. Henry Harrison: Are you involved with carbon credits? Leise Sandeman: Not directly. Carbon credits can be valuable, but we focus on measuring and reducing emissions in the production process itself. Our customers use us to decrease footprint rather than offset existing footprint. Henry Harrison: How did you come up with the name Pathways? Leise Sandeman: We kept coming back to the idea of making the decarbonization pathway visible for manufacturers. It’s often opaque and difficult. Plant teams usually know where the problems are. They don’t need lectures—they need the path to be clear so they can act on it. That’s what we’re trying to build. Henry Harrison: Leise, this has been great. I look forward to staying in touch and hearing more about your success. You’re doing important work, and you clearly enjoy it. Leise Sandeman: It’s a privilege to do this work with our customers every day. I’m grateful, and I appreciate being invited to talk about something I love. Henry Harrison: Thank you very much. Talk to you soon. Leise Sandeman: Talk to you soon.