Why We Invested in Epoch

A global coffee chain can tell you exactly how many stores it operates in Shanghai, but ask where the coffee beans in your morning brew were grown, let alone what happened to the land it grew on or how much water was consumed in the process and the answers are far more murky. Buyers need to know whether they can get the commodities they need, when they need them, and at the right quality. Knowing where those commodities come from is fundamental to assessing supply risks as well as meeting sustainability requirements. But the basic ingredients in the products we consume daily - coffee, cocoa, palm oil, rubber, timber and more – are sourced from small producers scattered across the world, several tiers removed from buyers’ own supply chain teams. Regulators have noticed the gap and are moving to close it. The EU, UK, California and Singapore all require some level of sustainability reporting. Moreover, supply chain shocks and disruptions - from droughts, floods, storms, and pests - can be extremely expensive and mitigating this risk has real top-line impact.

Supplier questionnaires and consultants can gather information from known suppliers. The harder problem is finding the farms and plantations further upstream and establishing what is happening there. Self-reported spreadsheets leave buyers dependent on what each intermediary can tell them, while collecting the data on the ground is expensive and difficult to scale. That leaves gaps in both supply risk assessments and the evidence behind sustainability claims.

Enter Epoch, a first-mile intelligence platform, powered by geospatial AI models, agentic research, over a billion training data points, and earth-scale processing infrastructure

to do the fieldwork nobody could afford to do in person. It scans a sourcing region, finds the producers of a given commodity, draws each plot's boundaries automatically, and estimates biomass and emissions from the imagery. Epoch gets that first-mile data remotely and automatically, at a fraction of the cost. They’re enabling a far more sophisticated and reliable way of tracking down data that is required for hundreds of thousands of companies and their supply chains. Jinal, William, Jake, welcome to the Burnt Island. Here's why we did it.

Demand from the Ground Up

Buyers need data about farms, plantations and smallholdings several tiers removed from anyone who could answer a phone call about them. A buyer often can't name their own supplier's supplier, let alone send a questionnaire to a producer whose existence they don't know about. Droughts and floods have already made coffee and cocoa supply unpredictable and expensive, raising the stakes on getting this data right.

Most software in the category picks one metric, carbon or deforestation, and stops there, missing the first mile entirely. Somebody has to locate the plot, work out who's farming it, and measure what's happening on the ground, at a scale no team of people could ever walk by hand.

Customers need an automated, low-cost, comprehensive, and accurate solution to streamline the reporting process, generate supply chain risk assessments that can feed into sourcing decisions, and help them lower overall exposure to climate-related impacts. Epoch does exactly that without waiting for a producer to submit anything or for a survey to go out. Where an absolute number really matters, for a carbon removal credit say, Epoch sends someone to take one measurement at the exact spot and calibrates the model for the surrounding area with it. Data flows out through an API into the procurement systems buyers already run, and onboarding can take as little as a week.

A New Perspective on an Old Problem

Jinal Surti (co-founder and CEO) spent his early career at Ripple, moving money across borders on a blockchain built to establish trust between parties who'd never met. That background turned out to be the right skill set for the extraordinary challenge of proving where a commodity actually came from. Substitute tracking down coffee beans and rubber trees for currency movement, and the fundamentals of trust are practically the same.

Joined by William Ouellette (CTO), an environmental data scientist who built monitoring frameworks for the World Bank and the UN, and Jake Wilkins (founding engineer), Jinal and team are bringing world-class blockchain engineering to supply chain and sustainability management to automate the first-mile problem at scale.

When Significant Players Pay Attention

For their customers, the breakthrough is not only doing this at scale, but doing this cheaply and accurately at the same time. Epoch delivers biomass analysis at a fraction of the cost of the next cheapest option, and holds prediction error under 2.6% against an industry standard of 22%.

After just two years in the market and initially a small team of three, they have secured key early customers among both producers and buyers, reaching them directly and through supply chain platform partners. Producers use the platform to monitor operations and report to buyers, while buyers use the data to understand their supply chains.

Crucially, the product pays for the producer too. Producers have used Epoch data to negotiate better prices and open new revenue lines from carbon removals.

They’ve achieved all of this with a team of 3, now a team of 14, that acts like a team of 140 . Their tech and product prowess, being AI first, and their timing regarding enabling technology is a powerful combination for radical cost control while maintaining compelling margins.

Building Sticky Moats with Data

Epoch’s proprietary set of first-mile producer data (a mix of public data and buyer/producer data they have amassed) has helped them to create an early competitive barrier, and data and network density will allow them to build a powerful moat as they scale. Because the data is referenced by multiple parties in the supply chain, every new customer opens the door to another and every new data point will improve model accuracy for others. Epoch retains ownership of producer data and is able to reuse processed data to drive marginal processing costs down.

There are likely to be strong network effects here as more producers and buyers are onboarded, the platform’s utility will increase for all participants on both sides of the equation. And it’s sticky. There is very little incentive to switch once you have all your supply chain data in a platform at such low cost vs the alternative. There is power in being the first mover under the AI paradigm of building this kind of intelligence platform. They’re also through a key signalling stage gate. Adoption by major producers and buyers is important for credibility with new large customers.

Big Markets that Get Bigger

Buyer-side monitoring alone is a $1 billion-a-year market. Producer-side monitoring is worth $40 billion. Carbon insetting and intervention monitoring runs $160 to $180 billion. The broader forestry and agricultural commodity market beyond that is worth more than $5 trillion. Every new hectare Epoch monitors makes its models more accurate for every customer already on the platform, and every new customer adds more first-mile data to the system. That advantage compounds, and it will be tough for a competitor to close the gap to Epoch if they maintain their speed.

If their thesis plays out, Epoch could become the system of record for environmental data in coffee, cocoa, rubber, palm oil and timber (and more), embedded into the procurement workflows of the world's largest buyers. There's a path beyond compliance reporting too, into embedded finance, lenders and insurers pricing risk off the same dataset that facilitates sustainability-linked loans and credit lines, and unlocks better insurance coverage and pricing for more transparent sustainable producers.

We’re thrilled to be backing Epoch alongside Sand River Ventures, Amadeus and Mercy Corps Ventures. Jinal, William, Jake: thank you for having us along. Welcome to the Burnt Island.