Building the world's first AI agents specifically for ESG teams
Briink has raised €3.85 million to help ESG teams verify and benchmark their sustainability data
Our venture Briink announced some exciting news today: the company has secured €3.85 million in funding to mark the next chapter in their mission to empower ESG and sustainability teams through AI.
This milestone couldn’t have come at a more important time. Given new EU regulations, companies are now about to face fresh challenges when it comes to reporting their environmental impact. I’ve been so amazed at how Briink has grown, already working with more than 40 enterprise clients to ensure accurate and compliant ESG data driving real impact.
Merantix was proud to invest again in Briink, alongside co-leads EquityPitcher Venture and 13 Books Capital, with additional support from seed + speed ventures and a group of notable angel investors all believing in this company’s great mission.
I spoke about the news with cofounder Tomas van der Heijden, who I’ve had the pleasure of working with ever since he joined Merantix as a founder-in-residence a few years ago. We covered how AI is shifting what’s possible in sustainability and Briink’s big plans for the future. Check out our conversation below:
Rasmus: What inspired the creation of Briink, and what specific gap in the ESG and AI space were you aiming to fill?
Tomas: Briink was born from a belief that we need to harness the power of AI toward the most important mission of our time: avoiding disaster and accelerating the transition to a sustainable future. In our very first workshop over two years ago, we captured this in our mission statement: “We want to support those truly working for a better future and call out those who are not.” That vision still guides us today.
ESG can be complicated, often misused for greenwashing or treated as a compliance formality. This is why Briink exists. We’ve built AI tools to cut through the complexity, verify ESG claims with real evidence, and empower teams to work faster and more effectively—all while ensuring every decision is grounded in truth.
For us, this isn’t just about technology—it’s about doing what’s right for our family, friends, and our collective future. With Briink, we aim to prevent greenwashing, drive impactful action, and help ensure that regulations are strong enough to guide us toward a thriving and resilient planet.
How do you see AI shaping the future of ESG compliance and sustainability efforts for businesses?
AI is set to play a transformative role in the future of ESG compliance and sustainability by augmenting the capabilities of teams and empowering businesses to navigate an increasingly complex landscape. As regulations become more stringent and the demand for transparency grows, businesses are tasked with managing vast amounts of ESG data while dealing with a shortage of specialized knowledge and labor. AI can enhance the effectiveness of existing teams, enabling them to work faster, smarter, and with greater precision.
Rather than replacing human expertise, AI enhances it by taking on time-consuming tasks like data gathering, processing, and analysis. This gives ESG teams the ability to operate at a scale previously unimaginable, handling large volumes of complex data with speed and accuracy. By simplifying the most intricate parts of ESG compliance, AI allows teams to focus on critical actions, such as developing sustainability strategies and engaging with stakeholders.
AI also plays a key role in ensuring the accuracy and credibility of ESG data. With real-time validation and deep analysis, AI tools help verify ESG claims, reducing the risk of greenwashing and building trust in the data. This enables businesses to confidently act on insights and make decisions that align with their sustainability goals.
What are you going to use the fresh funding for?
We’re using the fresh funding to push the boundaries of AI in the ESG space by developing specialized AI agents that can take on entire roles within ESG teams, not just individual tasks.
These AI agents will autonomously extract and verify ESG data, provide insights, and ensure compliance across multiple frameworks. Whether it's generating reports, drafting policies, creating improvement plans, or keeping ESG data up-to-date, these agents will help teams move beyond analysis to driving real action.
Our ultimate goal is to transform how businesses approach ESG. We’re empowering companies to scale their sustainability efforts more efficiently and effectively, enabling them to make greater progress toward their sustainability goals.
Obviously trust is really critical when it comes to sustainability. AI can be such a black box, so how do you ensure that your models not only operate ethically but also transparently?
Trust is absolutely critical when it comes to sustainability. At Briink, we've developed proprietary innovations that allow our AI models to achieve upwards of 90% accuracy when it comes to analyzing ESG data, but accuracy is just one part of the equation. Transparency and user control are equally important, and we’ve built our systems to ensure both.
Our approach is based on four key innovations. First, we have tailored data pre-processing specifically for ESG documents, allowing us to clean and structure information in a way that suits this unique space. Second, we’ve developed advanced prompt engineering with complex AI chains and agents specifically designed for ESG use cases. Third, our models undergo ESG-specific fine-tuning, enriched with deep ESG knowledge to ensure the most relevant and accurate results. Finally, we’ve designed our user interface to integrate human-in-the-loop workflows, meaning users can review, verify, and refine the AI's outputs, keeping them in control of the decision-making process.
To further enhance transparency, we also employ sentence-level source referencing. This feature allows users to trace every AI-generated insight back to its original source, providing full visibility into how the model arrived at its conclusions. By combining cutting-edge AI capabilities with transparency-focused design, we ensure that our models not only perform at a high level but also build trust with users, empowering them to take confident, informed actions in their sustainability efforts.
How does Briink differ from the competition in this space?
Briink sets itself apart from the competition by focusing on domain-specific AI solutions tailored exclusively for the ESG space, unlike generic tools like ChatGPT or Microsoft Co-Pilot. In the world of ESG, there are unique challenges that require specialized knowledge and precision. ESG data is highly complex, often scattered across various documents, reports, and regulatory frameworks, with nuances that general AI models simply aren't equipped to handle. Our AI is fine-tuned to understand and process these intricacies, ensuring the accuracy, relevance, and depth required for ESG-specific workflows.
Moreover, within the ESG software space, what really sets us apart is our focus on solving the hard, day-to-day problems ESG teams face—not just helping with occasional reporting. ESG compliance isn’t a once-a-year checkbox; it’s an ongoing challenge that involves constantly gathering, verifying, and analyzing large volumes of data.
The regulatory landscape and thinking around sustainability and ESG is shifting. How do you stay ahead of the curve?
The regulatory landscape around sustainability and ESG is indeed shifting rapidly, and at Briink, we stay ahead of the curve by focusing on one of the most critical trends we’re seeing globally: the demand for more transparent, audit-proof data. As regulations evolve, it’s no longer enough for companies to simply report on ESG initiatives; they now need to ensure that their data is verifiable, consistent, and able to withstand rigorous scrutiny from auditors, investors, and regulators alike.
Our AI models are built to address this shift head-on. We’ve designed our tools to not only automate data extraction and verification but to ensure that the data ESG teams work with is fully transparent and traceable. This means that every insight, every ESG claim can be backed by auditable evidence, which is critical in a regulatory environment that increasingly demands proof over promises.
How do you ensure Briink can help find accurate and reliable data across industries that can maybe be inconsistent in their data?
ESG is still quite a new and fragmented space, with numerous regulatory standards and voluntary frameworks across industries. This fragmentation creates major headaches for ESG teams, as they struggle to keep up with varying requirements and scattered data. However, it also presents a significant opportunity for AI and LLM solution providers. At Briink, we built our platform with this challenge in mind, ensuring it's adaptable and flexible enough to meet the needs of diverse industries and frameworks.
Our platform is designed to be flexible on both the user and technical sides. Users can easily create, customize, and analyze their own ESG questionnaires, allowing them to adapt to specific industry needs or changing regulatory landscapes. On the technical side, we’ve built our stack in a model-agnostic way, incorporating both open-source and closed-source models. This ensures that our platform can evolve as new standards emerge and integrate the best AI models available.
Additionally, we’ve focused heavily on creating a robust data infrastructure and document processing system. Our platform can handle diverse document types, and our tailored pre-processing techniques ensure that data from various frameworks is captured accurately and consistently. This flexibility allows Briink to support ESG teams in navigating the complex regulatory environment across industries with ease.
Bigger picture, do you think Briink’s offering can not only help companies think about their compliance, but also help them think about driving real sustainability innovation?
Absolutely. While Briink’s platform helps companies simplify ESG data verification, it also enables them to drive real sustainability innovation. By providing real-time, verifiable ESG data, we empower businesses to move beyond just meeting regulations, offering insights that can highlight gaps, identify opportunities, and support proactive sustainability strategies.
Briink helps companies not only comply but also innovate—whether it's developing greener products, optimizing supply chains, or setting ambitious ESG targets. In the bigger picture, our platform acts as a catalyst for companies to lead in sustainability, driving meaningful impact beyond compliance.
Where do you see ESG going in the next 5 or 10 years?
In the next 5 to 10 years, I see ESG being transformed by AI, as it brings down the cost of intelligence to near zero across industries. For ESG, this means reducing the cost of non-financial and sustainability analysis to the point where it’s possible to perform detailed, real-time ESG assessments of all entities at massive scale and depth. AI will enable companies to analyze their sustainability data effortlessly and continuously, unlocking insights that were previously too expensive or complex to obtain.
In this future, AI-driven ESG analysis will leave no room for greenwashing, as all claims can be verified in real-time with auditable evidence. Decision-makers will be able to make optimal choices on non-financial matters because they’ll have access to accurate, transparent data at their fingertips. Moreover, this transparency will provide a solid foundation for stronger, more ambitious regulations, as regulators will have the data needed to enforce accountability and drive higher standards.
With this vision, Briink is positioned to play a key role in making this future a reality. Our recent funding allows us to scale our platform and deliver the kind of impact we’ve always imagined—helping businesses, investors, and regulators achieve their sustainability goals with unprecedented clarity and confidence.
Thanks very much for the chat!