Ripple alum’s Epoch raises $4.25M to help small importers meet EU deforestation rules

Epoch has raised $4.25 million in seed funding, with Burnt Island Ventures and Sand River leading the round. That takes the London startup’s total funding to $6.26 million. The company is aiming at a problem that looks simple on paper and ugly in practice: helping smaller importers comply with the EU’s deforestation rules without turning every shipment into a months-long paperwork hunt.

The EU Deforestation Regulation covers cattle, cocoa, coffee, oil palm, rubber, soya and wood products. Large and medium operators fall under it from 30 December 2026, while most micro and small operators follow on 30 June 2027. To comply, companies have to trace goods back to the plot of land where they were produced and submit a due diligence statement. Epoch is trying to make that possible with a self-serve tool that starts from supplier names instead of plot coordinates.

The startup says its software uses geospatial AI and software agents to map the first mile of a supply chain, find the farms, plantations and mines involved, and check for deforestation and legality risks. The result is a due diligence statement with cited findings that can be submitted to the EU’s TRACES system. Epoch says compliance teams can use the platform directly or work through assistants like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, while sensitive customer data stays in the customer’s own environment.

Jinal Surti, Epoch’s co-founder and chief executive, started out working on moving capital into emerging markets. He co-founded the company in 2023 with the goal of getting money to farmers at the start of supply chains and cutting emissions. Co-founder and CTO William Ouellette previously co-founded Soilwatch, which helped developers design projects for the voluntary carbon market. Epoch now verifies the origin of cocoa, coffee and rubber, and says its broader work spans carbon removal as well as EUDR compliance.

There is a real opening here, and a real trap. AI-powered compliance is getting funded across Europe, with rivals like Complir and CRACI also pulling in fresh capital. But the whole category still lives or dies on the quality of the underlying data, and Epoch itself says no single map should be treated as the final word. That’s the sort of problem software loves to promise away and reality enjoys reintroducing at filing time.