Street Talk

Newcastle-born ESG consultant Umwelt courts PE; $100m price tag tipped

Sarah Thompson, Kanika Sood and Emma Rapaport

Feb 27, 2025 – 5.34pm

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ESG consulting businesses are hot to trot with buyout firms. Just ask Quadrant Private Equity, which acquired Sydney’s EMM Consulting in December, or KKR, whose dealmakers came calling for Melbourne’s Energetics last year.

Street Talk can reveal EMM’s competitor Umwelt, a 30-year-old ESG consulting firm with 359 staffers, has jumped on the bandwagon and tasked Deloitte with helping it find a private equity partner. Sources said Umwelt wants a long-term, minority shareholder.

Sarah Thompson has co-edited Street Talk since 2009, specialising in private equity, investment banking, M&A and equity capital markets stories. Prior to that, she spent 10 years in London as a markets and M&A reporter at Bloomberg and Dow Jones.

Kanika Sood is a journalist based in Sydney who writes for the Street Talk column.

Emma Rapaport is a co-editor of the Street Talk column. Prior to that, she was a markets reporter at The Australian Financial Review.