The most expensive kilometer in the world is the first one. It’s the distance between a cocoa tree in West Africa and the nearest dirt road, the gap where a coffee farmer’s harvest changes hands, the undocumented plot where rubber is tapped. For a decade, supply chain managers have tried to bridge it with spreadsheets and supplier questionnaires, a system that is about as reliable as asking for directions in a language you don’t speak. Now, a wave of European regulations is turning that data gap into a legal liability, and a London startup named Epoch is betting that the only honest answer comes from space.
Founded in 2023, Epoch sells a geospatial data layer. It uses satellite imagery and machine learning to map the specific plots where commodities originate, then checks those coordinates against a growing list of regulatory frameworks like the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) and the U.S. Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act [Epoch Blue, retrieved 2026]. The company’s premise is simple: if you can’t trust a form, trust a pixel. In October 2026, it secured a $4.25 million seed round led by Burnt Island Ventures, bringing its total disclosed funding to $6.26 million [Tech Funding News, October 2026].
The regulatory wedge
Epoch isn’t selling sustainability reports. It’s selling compliance insurance. Its product is an API that plugs into existing supply chain risk and enterprise resource planning platforms, delivering a yes-or-no answer on whether a shipment’s origin passes muster for a given rule [Epoch Blue, retrieved 2026]. The company claims its database covers over 15 million sites and has analyzed more than 250 million hectares, with a particular focus on soft commodities like cocoa, coffee, and rubber [Causeartist, retrieved 2026].
The regulatory tailwind is concrete and urgent. The EUDR, which came into full force in late 2024, requires companies to prove their commodities are not linked to deforestation after 2020. Similar rules around forced labor and carbon disclosure are stacking up, creating a compliance matrix that is impossible to manage manually. Epoch’s pitch is to be the single data layer for all of them. “We offer one data layer for six regulatory frameworks,” the company states, listing EUDR, the amended CSDDD, and the EU Forced Labour Regulation among them [Causeartist, retrieved 2026].
How the map gets made
The technical wedge is what co-founder and CTO William Ouellette’s team calls “cost-effective ground-truthing baked into model design” [Chris Docherty - LinkedIn, retrieved 2026]. In practice, this means using a combination of satellite data, existing trade databases, and proprietary algorithms to identify and monitor individual plots without needing to send a person to every farm. The company says it has collected over a billion data points of training data and built a database of over 200,000 processing facilities [Epoch Blue, retrieved 2026].
This data layer is then productized through partnerships. Epoch doesn’t aim to own the end-customer relationship for a multinational food company. Instead, it powers the compliance features inside platforms like Assent and Resilinc. For example, a partnership with Resilinc connects Epoch’s location validation directly into that platform’s supplier outreach and risk prioritization workflows for EUDR [SignalNews Dayton, September 2026]. This “picks-and-shovels” strategy lets Epoch scale its data asset across thousands of corporate customers indirectly.
The company’s reported traction is a mix of direct and indirect reach. It claims to support over 30,000 corporates through platform partners and direct work [Epoch Blue, retrieved 2026]. A separate report cites 24,000+ corporates reached through partners [Causeartist, retrieved 2026]. The more concrete figure is the 800+ enterprise customers it says it reaches through its partnership with Assent alone [Epoch Blue, retrieved 2026].
The team and the terrain
Co-founder and CEO Jinal Surti leads the company from London, with a team that includes commercial leads building business across EMEA [Jaime Pérez Martín-Gaitero - LinkedIn, retrieved 2026]. The investor alignment is telling. Burnt Island Ventures is a climate-tech specialist, and Sand River participated in the round, signaling a belief that supply chain transparency is a climate issue as much as a logistics one [Tech Funding News, October 2026].
The competitive landscape includes compliance software players like GAN Integrity, but Epoch’s differentiation is its foundational geospatial data. Others may help manage the paperwork, but Epoch is trying to become the source of truth for where things actually come from.
Where the wheels could come off
The bet rests on a few critical assumptions. The first is accuracy at scale. A false positive on deforestation could block a legitimate shipment; a false negative could let a non-compliant one through, exposing the end customer to fines. The company’s public materials emphasize its training data volume, but the real-world error rate in complex agricultural landscapes is the single biggest technical risk.
The second is the pace of regulation. Epoch’s entire market is created by regulatory friction. If enforcement is delayed or watered down, the urgency for its product diminishes. Conversely, if new rules emerge rapidly in other regions, it must expand its dataset accordingly.
Finally, there’s the business model risk of being a layer, not a brand. While capital-efficient, it creates dependency on platform partners for distribution and could limit pricing power. The company will need to demonstrate that its data is sufficiently superior to become indispensable to those partners.
The next twelve months
With the new capital, the focus will be on deepening dataset coverage, adding more commodities, and forging additional platform integrations. The company has already begun hiring, as evidenced by a recent LinkedIn post welcoming a new team member [Julie Dermati - LinkedIn, retrieved 2026]. The milestone to watch is whether it can convert its seed partnerships into multi-year, enterprise-wide contracts that prove the unit economics of selling pixels by the ton.
On the back of an envelope, the scale of the problem is immense. The EU imports roughly 10% of the world’s coffee and 25% of its cocoa. If Epoch can charge a fraction of a cent per kilogram for compliance verification across just those two streams in Europe, the addressable revenue quickly reaches nine figures. The incumbent it must beat isn’t another software company. It’s the entrenched, inefficient system of manual surveys and sworn statements that has obscured supply chains for generations. Epoch’s bet is that in the age of regulation and satellites, opacity is no longer a cost of doing business, but the costliest risk of all.
Sources
- [Epoch Blue, retrieved 2026] First-Mile Data Layer for Supply Chains | https://epoch.blue/
- [Tech Funding News, October 2026] Epoch raises $6.26M and launches self-serve EUDR compliance for small businesses | https://techfundingnews.com/epoch-4-25m-seed-eudr-first-mile-supply-chain/
- [Causeartist, retrieved 2026] Article on Epoch's mission and regulatory coverage | https://causeartist.com/
- [Chris Docherty - LinkedIn, retrieved 2026] Post on Epoch's model design | https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-docherty-1b70291b/
- [SignalNews Dayton, September 2026] Resilinc Extends its Supply Chain Risk and Compliance Intelligence Platform with Compliance for EUDR | https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/resilinc-extends-its-supply-chain-risk-and-compliance-intelligence-platform-with-compliance-for-eudr-1036582084
- [Jaime Pérez Martín-Gaitero - LinkedIn, retrieved 2026] Profile noting EMEA business development | https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaimeperezmartingaitero/
- [Julie Dermati - LinkedIn, retrieved 2026] Post liking a welcome message for a new Epoch team member | https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliedermati/