Pontoka is a portmanteau of ‘ponto’ (Latin for bridge builder) and ‘toka’ (Sanskrit for newborn).
Our purpose is to bridge the ESG principles with corporate strategies and thereby giving life to new, visionary growth.
Meet the founder
Danish-born Mathias Barfoed Pontoppidan developed an early fascination for India’s economic spirit during his international business college in Copenhagen. What started as an analytical conviction that India holds the potential to become the world’s dominating economy, grew to become an emotional attachment to the country and its endless contradictions.
Driven to identify his ‘operational expertise’ in the market, Mathias started off in India in 2012 and worked across India-entry consulting, investment banking (M&A and private equity), hedge funds, and advisory on a wide range of strategic projects for top managements and company owners.
While working on a project to create a sustainable investment product contextualised to India, Mathias discovered an expertise gap that combined economics, finance, policy, sustainability and cross-border know-how.
Giving life to Pontoka, Mathias started working with investment clients and quickly evolved capabilities to support corporates on complex sustainability ambitions beyond the generic, surface-level work, by building a network of accomplished experts within the various sub-themes of ESG.
Our defining principles
Firstly, we consciously stay away from ‘plain vanilla’ services and projects as well as unambitious/dispassionate partner mindsets. We thrive with challenging and complex client problem statements, and we find lacking ambition from clients to clash with our desire to ideate and mobilise industry forefront solutions.
Secondly, we listen. Nowadays, many advisory businesses do not listen anymore, and have - in their journeys to scale - built cash cow business models with offerings holding low degrees of customisation. We adopt the opposite mindset by remaining specialised and exploring how we can partner flexibly with our clients.
PONTOKA THROUGH THE YEARS
Our engagement model
We believe there is no one size fits all solution in this domain. Instead of short-term plug-and-play solutions, we drive long-term value creation by co-creating bespoke solutions through one on one engagement. We like our clients to see us as partners on their journey towards ESG leadership.