Timothy Daniel, MBA 24, spent a year at Berkeley Haas exploring ideas for a legal research startup, but wasn’t getting any traction.
Then he had an epiphany: Why not try to solve a problem he already understood, which was the complexity of legal compliance in the energy industry. “I started digging deeper, and I realized that this was an even bigger problem than I thought,” said Daniel, who was senior legal counsel and head of compliance for an energy group before coming to Haas.
That deep dive led Daniel to launch Rimba, a startup working on an AI tool designed to streamline compliance and audit processes for industrial companies. Daniel co-founded Rimba with Akshay Sharma, who serves as CTO.
Companies that manufacture energy, fuels, and chemicals, and other direct carbon-emitting industries, are required to navigate complex regulatory compliance and meet audit requirements. The industrial sector faces nearly 300,000 such federal regulations, according to the National Association of Manufacturers.
Historically, companies have managed compliance documentation byusing email and Excel files that required manual data entry. Rimba’s AI-assisted platform can automate these processes for about half the cost, Daniel said.
“Technology has changed massively in the last 15 years but not at these companies,” Daniel said. “We thought that there must be a more efficient and verifiable way of doing reporting.”
“We thought that there must be a more efficient and verifiable way of doing reporting.” – Timothy Daniel, MBA 24
Rimba is designed to integrate with existing operational tools like SCADA systems—hardware and software that monitors and controls industrial processes—and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. The platform can process both structured and unstructured data, including PDFs or pictures of faxes, receipts, invoices, and utility bills, detecting data inconsistencies, missing entries, or potential compliance violations. It then uses AI to auto-populate compliance forms and Excel spreadsheets. Rimba can also predict future audit outcomes based on historical audit findings and automatically organize compliance-related files.
Landing a first customer
Daniel credits much of his success with Rimba to what he learned in the Lean LaunchPad class, which teaches founders to leave the office and talk to customers before trying to build anything. The class inspired him to pack a bag and attend biofuel, sustainability, and carbon certification conferences around the country, where he talked with potential customers.
“We got our first customer before we even built a product,” Daniel said. “Their sustainability compliance director had just resigned, so we jumped in and built a product for them.”
While at Haas, Daniel also eceived support from Rhonda Shrader, the executive director of the Berkeley Haas Entrepreneurship Program, who directs UC LAUNCH at Berkeley. “She really helped us get connected to the right people, and find the right advisors at the different stages of building the company,” he said.
Shrader praised Daniel for having the confidence required to pivot when–despite his industry experience–his initial startup hypotheses were invalidated. “This helped him get to the ground truth more quickly and innovate to solve top pain points,” she said.
The startup received a total of $175,000 in prizes in startup competitions at Berkeley, including UC LAUNCH (first place); AI Entrepreneurs at Berkeley Demo Day ($100K win) NFX Berkeley FAST funding competition; and Berkeley StEP.
Daniel, who doesn’t consider himself a traditional startup founder, said he was excited to win these awards. He is equally excited about the potential to improve the company’s technology. Rimba’s AI team is now working on evolving to an agentic AI platform that can more fully customize report building. He’s also set a goal of signing on 20 new customers and bringing in $1 million in revenue by the end of 2025.
Daniel said he is confident that Rimba will succeed because it not only saves firms money, but also increases reporting accuracy, which reduces the risk of fines when industrial companies are not compliant.
”I feel like I’m doing something meaningful because ultimately this reduces tedious, resource-intensive work in American industries,” he said.
Posted in:
Topics: