Founder: Shan Vahora
ESGAgent.ai, the Brisbane sustainability, safety and compliance platform for heavy industry, has closed a seed round led by US-Japan firm DNX Ventures, pushing total funding to $1.7 million. This is the second Australian investment DNX has made, following the Zeligate seed round in November 2025.
As mandatory climate disclosures, modern slavery rules, and new biodiversity obligations grow, heavy industry is drowning in spreadsheets, consultants and disconnected systems. ESGAgent.ai's AI-native platform consolidates those workflows, claiming to compress reporting timelines "from months to hours." Its customer roster already includes tier-one miners, major food manufacturers, global engineering consultants, and the Queensland Government, Lite n' Easy, Forest One, and XENCO.
The journey begins when the user uploads their existing resources, policies, emissions data, safety records and prior reports into a centralised knowledge library that the platform reads and organises against the frameworks that matter to them, whether that's AASB S2, TCFD, GRI, SASB, CDP or an industry-specific standard.
From there, the AI does the heavy lifting: it assesses the material, flags gaps, and generates comprehensive, framework-aligned reports in minutes, sparing the user the tedium of manually cross-referencing overlapping regulations.
The user simply converses with a dedicated AI agent in plain language, by voice or even image, and gets instant, sourced guidance. Once the initial reporting is done, the platform shifts into continuous monitoring mode, scanning documents in real time and pushing actionable alerts the moment a compliance gap or new exposure emerges. The net effect is that the user spends far less time hunting for information and formatting disclosures, and far more time acting on risks, turning compliance from a reactive, resource-draining chore into a proactive, strategic function they can manage from a single system.
The company is also beefing up its bench, adding former Arcadis commercial chief Greg Steele as investor and director, and ex-Ashurst risk advisory head Mike Duggan as EGM. The fresh capital will fund product development and customer acquisition as ESGAgent.ai pursues its goal of becoming the default system of record for Australian compliance.