In this episode of the Sunny Ray Show, host Sunny Ray talks with Timothy Daniel of Rimba, who calls his startup the unsexiest AI company you will hear about this year. Rimba builds AI tools for heavy industries such as fuel, oil and gas, and chemicals, helping operations and compliance teams optimize production and meet regulatory reporting requirements. Timothy draws on six years leading compliance at a mining and energy company, where audits and reporting relied on paper documents, spreadsheets, and PDFs. He describes an early detour into legal tech and personal injury law, the pivot toward what he knew best, and the customer discovery lessons he took from the Berkeley Lean Launchpad class. He covers meeting his first co-founder through Y Combinator's matching platform, landing a first contract before having a product, the compliance frameworks Rimba supports, and how Y Combinator taught him to run a focused fundraising process. He also explains Rimba's go-to-market motion, the roughly 16 million data points the platform processes daily, and the company's work on agentic time series reasoning.
A former mining compliance lead explains why boring heavy industry, with its spreadsheets and audits, is where AI can do real work.
Why do you call Rimba the unsexiest AI company this year?
We build for heavy industries, the companies making fuel, oil and gas, and chemicals that sit behind almost everything we use daily, like plastics and party cups. Most AI builders have never looked at these areas. We help their operations and compliance teams optimize production and meet regulatory reporting and certification requirements.
What did your compliance job show you about how these companies run?
For six years I led compliance at a mining and energy company, and the process was highly manual. Production is huge, but tracking where material goes through trucks, rail, and ships lived in paper documents and Excel spreadsheets. I had to collect that data, format it into templates, and report it to stakeholders like port authorities and certification bodies.
What was the audit process like?
Audits on operations and production data can be as painful as financial audits. Third-party auditors dive deep into your documents and you must substantiate everything, which means long nights for them and your team. The bottleneck is knowing who is responsible for the data and where it is stored, across potentially thousands of documents over a year.
What happened with your early legal tech idea?
After moving to the Bay Area in 2022, I tinkered with legal tech because it was close to my background. That led me to personal injury law, a niche I could not see myself in for five to ten years. It did not feel meaningful, and I got pretty depressed for a couple of months. Advice from other founders pushed me to pivot to operations and compliance in heavy industries.
How did you land your first customer before you had a product?
We talked to customers as early as possible. Because we target enterprises, they first needed to hear about our process and whether it matched their needs, less about the platform itself. We presented the concept of Rimba, discussed what they needed, then proposed a timeline to build it for them. That is how we got our first contract.
Which compliance framework was hardest, and which do you cover?
Each program has its own challenges, so I do not see one particular framework as the hardest for us. In North America we cover the EPA's Renewable Fuel Standard, and internationally the International Sustainability and Carbon Certification. The most rigorous in the industry is probably California's Low Carbon Fuel Standard.
What did fundraising teach you?
It taught me resilience, and Y Combinator taught us to run a process. Instead of talking to random investors every week and burning time, you pool the investors you will speak with into a set window. Run first calls over a week or two, filter to second calls, then move toward the raise. Focus protects the time you need to sell.
How would you explain Rimba to a plant owner in 90 seconds?
Rimba is an AI industrial data platform that connects fragmented documents and software systems. We aggregate that data in one place and become the single source of truth. You can analyze it, optimize operations, and pull the data needed to create the compliance reports you must file on a regular cadence.
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