Datamaran: Built for a World Where Risks Have Arrived
Datamaran's CEO on how our new brand identity aligns with our product vision and helps enterprises move from understanding to acting on risks.
Where we came from
Today we launched our new brand identity.
In 2014, we believed risks and opportunities existed outside the walls of how businesses were actually run: real issues not yet part of governance conversations, not because leaders didn't care, but because there was no evidence-based way to bring them into the room. So we set out to build one: a way to ground these issues in fact (regulatory signals, reputational data, competitive intelligence, industry benchmarks) so they'd stop being dismissed as "soft" or emotional, and start being treated as what they always were. Business issues. We also bet that advanced technology, largely untapped at that time, could operationalize how companies worked with them, not just surface the risks. Evidence plus technology remains our throughline today.
What's changed since
In my years building Datamaran, I went from being a newlywed, "sky's the limit" founder to a mom of twins. Moving back to the Dutch countryside post-pandemic, I reconnected with a part of myself that was less about individual ambition and more about community and prioritizing our family's health and wellbeing, and doing whatever it takes to safeguard my kids' future. When you feel that responsibility that closely, you start to hope businesses will do their part too. Because they can.
That shift from something distant and abstract to something immediate and personal is, in a small way, the same shift we've watched happen in the market. We had the wind at our backs as ESG went mainstream, and went all in on that label along with everyone else. Then came the backlash, and in a lot of ways, we're starting over.
But here's what's different this time: the pitch has changed. Before 2014, and even through the ESG boom, the case for action was long-term value creation: a horizon so distant it was easy to deprioritize. That's no longer the world we're in. We've lived through extreme weather, a pandemic, and a run of "horizon risks" that have simply arrived. It's no longer hypothetical: which of these have already materialized, and how are they hitting your business today? A more urgent question than the one we asked in 2014 and easier to act on, because the evidence already exists.
At the same time, the people who owned this work are disappearing. Sustainability teams have been disbanded or absorbed; CSOs demoted or eliminated. And while CSRD did put sustainability on the board's agenda, it also reduced the conversation to a compliance checklist, which was easy to deprioritize once the requirements changed. The mistake is thinking the issues went away. They didn't. What went away was ownership. Without an owner, no one's watching.
Where we’re headed
If you take our belief seriously, it changes how a company actually operates. It means fewer issues, not more: three to five things materially affecting your business right now, instead of a sprawling list of horizon risks. It means real-time evidence, because the world doesn't move at the pace of annual filings anymore, and neither should we. And increasingly, it means looking inward as much as outward since a huge share of business risk today sits inside a company's own value chain. Our role is to surface what's relevant and provide you with enough evidence to decide what to do with it.
Our product has already moved on, and the questions we're asked have shifted from sustainability teams thinking about long-term value to risk, legal, and executive leaders who need a defensible way to govern what's hitting their business now. That's why we're launching Datamaran's new brand today. Our brand needed to reflect that reality.
It's the same lesson I learned at home: the risks that once felt like someday problems don't stay that way. They arrive, and you find out how prepared you were right when it matters most. That’s true for family, and true for business. This rebrand isn't just a new coat of paint. It's us lifting the lid on what Datamaran has become.
What we're committing to
Twelve years ago, we promised evidence-based, technology-driven clarity on risks the market hadn't caught up to yet. That promise hasn't changed, but our ability to deliver on it has: faster data, faster analysis, faster insights into your hands. We'll keep building the most credible radar available, expanding what counts as evidence, and adapting to how you work and not the other way around.
A year from now, we want you to say: they moved from telling us what changed to helping us act on it. That's the shift. From understanding to acting. It's what we set out to do in 2014; it's what got personal for me along the way; and it's what we're doing now; just faster, with a clearer view of what's at stake.
— Marjella
