Datamaran Drops the ESG Label After Winning the Argument

Datamaran stripped ESG from its public identity on September 3, 2026, after 12 years of selling sustainability as hard business risk. The London software firm put up a new visual identity and website aimed at risk, legal, and executive buyers. Chief executive and co-founder Marjella Lecourt-Alma said the product had already moved. The brand had not.

In nearly a third of live deals, a general counsel or chief risk officer now sits beside the sustainability lead. The company that fought to make those issues undismissable is now selling them under a name those rooms will hear.

Why Datamaran Dropped ESG From Its Brand

Datamaran was founded in 2014 by Lecourt-Alma, Jérôme Basdevant, and Jean-Philippe Lecourt on a blunt bet: risks forming outside the usual board pack could be evidenced hard enough that leadership could not wave them away as soft. Sustainability, she has said, was not even a widely used boardroom word when they started. The firm built a database of company disclosures, rules, media, and peer filings so those issues could be treated as business facts.

That fight worked well enough to become a problem. After the ESG backlash, Lecourt-Alma told interviewers, “governance” and “enterprise risk” travel further in the rooms the firm now enters than “ESG” does. Climate exposure, supply-chain fragility, and regulatory upheaval did not leave. The label that carried them into the building started closing doors.

Two years ago, our customers were sustainability teams thinking about long-term value. Today, those issues have become immediate business risks, and we’re in the room with risk, legal, and senior leaders, because the questions they’re being asked have changed. Our product had evolved to meet that shift, but our brand hadn’t. This rebrand closes that gap.

Marjella Lecourt-Alma, CEO and co-founder, Datamaran rebrand announcement, September 3, 2026

Nick Geurds, the chief revenue officer, put the commercial version in one line: sustainability work has not gone away, it has moved, and the old story was slowing the sale. Prospects needed a faster way to see that Datamaran belonged in a governance conversation, he said, not on a sustainability dashboard.

The leftover is sitting on the new site. A frequently asked questions block still asks how Datamaran differs from other ESG software. The word the brand just buried remains the comparison shoppers type.

Nearly a Third of Live Deals Now Include Risk or Legal

Lecourt-Alma has been saying the same thing in slightly different rooms: the issues did not change, the audience did. Risk committees, general counsel inboxes, and board packs now sit alongside the sustainability lead. In her account, that is the evidence landing on more desks, not the function dying.

The sales mix is the hard number underneath the copy. Geurds said general counsel, chief risk officers, and other senior leaders now sit in nearly a third of Datamaran deals and want a defensible, data-driven process. The buyer who used to own the budget still shows up. She no longer owns the room alone.

That shift matches what recruiters are counting on the client side. Since January 2025, the share of U.S. chief sustainability officers who report to the chief executive has fallen from 33 percent to 14 percent, according to Weinreb Group, a search firm that has tracked the role since 2011. A quarter of CSOs in the 2026 census said the function itself had moved inside the company, with a growing share reporting into legal.

Customer pressure is still the top driver those officers name, at 62 percent, with regulatory pressure at 57 percent. When they describe how the work creates value, 62 percent point to risk mitigation. The language inside companies was already migrating toward risk and counsel before Datamaran reprinted its homepage.

A February Tool Already Sold to Compliance Buyers

The brand was lagging a product that had already found the new buyer. On February 25, 2026, Datamaran launched Regulatory Monitoring as a standalone tool for sustainability, legal, and compliance teams trying to keep up with overlapping rules. Lecourt-Alma called regulation one of the forces shaping corporate strategy and said leaders needed to move from reactive compliance to proactive governance.

The rebrand release treats that launch as proof. Legal and compliance buyers had already been using a feed that, in the company’s telling, extends well beyond ESG. The live product page now advertises 19,800 regulations across 190 countries, with alerts meant to surface a rule months or years before it bites.

The company published a short walkthrough the day the tool went live.

The rest of the suite was already being rebuilt around the same idea: fewer endless issue lists, more pressure on the three to five things hitting the business now.

THE THREE PRODUCTS ON THE NEW SITE

• Regulatory Monitoring: AI analysis plus expert-curated intelligence for risk, legal, sustainability, and compliance teams tracking rule changes across 190-plus countries.
• Datamaran Core: Repeatable materiality assessments, including CSRD double materiality, with stakeholder intelligence and reviewer workflows the company calls audit-ready.
• Datamaran Suite: Core plus Regulatory Monitoring plus peer benchmarking in one place, sold as a continuous view of governance-related matters.

The site also claims 120 in-house experts behind the models and more than 10,000 company disclosures analysed. An ontology page says the platform tracks more than 400 external risk factors across 99 topics and can be pointed at IFRS/ISSB, ESRS/CSRD, and GRI processes without being locked to one standard.

U.S. Companies Stopped Backfilling the CSO Chair

Weinreb Group’s July 2026 census is the cleanest public measure of the chair Datamaran used to sell into. For the first time since the firm began counting in 2011, CSO posts fell from 216 to 193 at U.S. listed companies, a 10 percent drop. Ellen Weinreb, the firm’s founder, noted that departure rates held around 36 percent. Companies simply stopped filling the empty seats. Newly appointed CSOs dropped from a long-run norm around 62 percent to 24 percent.

THE WEINREB CSO TALLY, JULY 2026

The work did not leave with the title. Weinreb found that 42 percent of CSOs reported more sustainability staff sitting outside the core function, against 28 percent who saw growth inside it. Average team size is still about 20 people. Eighty percent said budgets had risen or held; 20 percent reported a cut. Board engagement was up or unchanged for 88 percent, and 87 percent said governance structures were firmly in place.

Weinreb called the 2026 dip a single data point, not yet a trend, and a possible course correction after the early-2020s boom. For a vendor, the practical reading is simpler. The person who used to take the meeting may now sit in legal, risk, or operations, or the work may be split across all three. A homepage that still leads with ESG asks the new buyer to translate.

What the New Datamaran Site Sells Now

The refreshed homepage no longer opens on sustainability. It opens on an AI-powered governance platform that turns regulatory, market, and stakeholder signals into what the company calls decision-ready intelligence. Use cases on the first screen include regulatory fragmentation, AI governance, forced labor and human rights, and physical climate risk. The visual system, the firm said, dropped sustainability-sector cues for signals, evidence, and continuous monitoring.

The customer proof the new site chooses is as revealing as the copy. Jennifer Suleiman, chief sustainability officer at Zain Group, is still there, talking about materiality and stakeholder engagement. Directly under that sits Pete Underwood, senior vice president and chief legal officer at Fortive, describing a data-driven view of sustainability and risk that lets leadership act before issues hit the business.

Datamaran provides a comprehensive, data-driven view of the sustainability and risk landscape. It enables our leadership team to act with confidence, align strategy across our diverse operating companies, and anticipate emerging risks before they impact the business.

Pete Underwood, SVP and chief legal officer, Fortive, Datamaran homepage

Fortive is not a random logo. In September 2022 it led Datamaran’s £11.7 million Series B, with American Electric Power also in the round, and both were already clients. Intelex, a Fortive company, had taken an exclusive reseller deal in 2021. DLA Piper had already plugged the software into legal due diligence. Deloitte later used it for double-materiality work tied to CSRD in Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium. J.P. Morgan had built an investor-facing ESG Discovery tool on Datamaran’s engine in 2022.

Those partnerships put the product in legal, audit, and investor workflows years before the homepage caught up. The rebrand is, in that sense, late. It is also honest about who now has to defend the file.

Datamaran says it has more than 100 enterprise customers and offices in London, New York, Valencia, and Leeuwarden. In September 2024, funds managed by Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital led a $33 million Series C to push U.S. and European growth and generative AI. Two years later, AI is the first word on the masthead, and ESG is the word they are walking away from.

Bert Sinnema Takes the Engineering Brief

On September 4, 2026, one day after the rebrand, Datamaran appointed Bert Sinnema as chief technology officer. He is based in Leeuwarden and will run global engineering and product, including the Valencia hub. Lecourt-Alma tied the hire to the same shift as the brand: the company is moving from ESG issue management to an AI-powered governance platform, and she wanted a founder who had scaled teams through ugly markets.

Sinnema joined from Eye Security, where he was vice president of engineering, built the product group from scratch, tripled a multi-hub team, and helped the firm reach a €60 million Series C. Before that he was a director of engineering at HackerOne and founder-CTO of SmartLockr. His own line was that he likes the intersection of product engineering and AI, “where the hardest problems live.”

DATAMARAN FROM 2014 TO THE REBRAND

1. 2014: Marjella Lecourt-Alma, Jérôme Basdevant, and Jean-Philippe Lecourt found Datamaran to put evidence under risks boards still treated as soft.
2. September 20, 2022: Fortive leads a £11.7 million Series B, with American Electric Power participating; both are already clients.
3. September 2024: Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital leads a $33 million Series C aimed at U.S. and European growth and generative AI.
4. February 25, 2026: Regulatory Monitoring launches as a standalone product for legal, compliance, and sustainability teams.
5. September 3, 2026: The company rebrands around governance, drops sustainability-first messaging, and relaunches datamaran.com.
6. September 4, 2026: Bert Sinnema joins as CTO to accelerate AI across the platform.

The sequence is the argument in dates. Capital went into AI in 2024. The legal-facing product shipped in February. The brand caught up in September, and the engineering hire arrived the next morning.

London Hears the Governance Pitch on September 8

Public reaction on X was close to nil, a couple of syndicated posts and no real argument. That fits a deal that now closes in risk committees and counsel inboxes rather than in open ESG threads. The people who used to cheer this kind of launch are no longer the people who sign.

Lecourt-Alma has been careful not to frame the rename as a retreat. Same issues, she has said, same evidence, same 2014 mission, different name for a different audience. The job, as she describes it, is to keep the sustainability function’s discipline in the room as the audience widens, and to make sure that function keeps its seat.

On September 8 and 9, 2026, Datamaran sponsors Sustainability LIVE: The London Summit + Awards, five days after the rebrand. The firm will be on the floor under a governance mark, selling real-time evidence to rooms that still gather under a sustainability banner. The issues on the slides will look familiar. The word on the badge will not.