In 2015, three people looked at how businesses managed environmental, health and safety compliance and reached the same uncomfortable conclusion: it was almost impossible to do well.

Regulations lived in PDFs, paid subscriptions, filing cabinets, and the heads of a few long-tenured team members. A site manager in Johannesburg had to somehow know that a new water regulation applied to their specific operation, not to the country in general, not to the industry as a whole, but to that borehole, at that depth, drawing that volume. And they usually had to figure it out by reading a 400-page statute themselves.

Ten years later, that's still a fair description of how a lot of the world does compliance. But it's no longer how our customers do it. And that's what we're celebrating today.

An idea from 2015, a company from 2016

Libryo was founded in 2015 by Peter Flynn, Garth Watson and Malcolm Gray - three people who thought regulatory complexity deserved better tooling than a stack of PDFs and a hope that everyone reads carefully. The company was officially registered in the UK on 16 February 2016. A decade on, we're just over 70 people, operating across 123 countries, and part of ERM after the ERM acquired Libryo in December 2022.

Somewhere in that journey - probably around country number fifty - we realised we hadn't just built a legal register. We'd built a way of thinking about regulatory intelligence: one that starts with a site, not a statute; that treats compliance as a live discipline, not a paperwork exercise; and that recognises the person doing the work rarely has the luxury of reading the source law themselves.

Joining ERM

In December 2022, Libryo joined forces with ERM - the world's largest pure-play sustainability consultancy. David Hopkins, Business Unit Managing Partner for ERM Libryo, backed the idea that Libryo's technology paired with ERM's global sustainability consultancy and EHS expertise could reach far more organisations than either business could do alone.

It also brought things full circle: Standards & Legal, the consulting business Libryo had spun out of back in 2016, was absorbed into what's now ERM Libryo, reuniting the two halves of the original business, this time backed by ERM's scale.

The numbers, ten years in

• 123 countries with live regulatory coverage
• 1,400+ jurisdictions available in the application
• 38,000+ site locations (Libryo Streams)
• 11,800+ legal updates sent to organizations
• 34,000+ laws ingested, enhanced and tracked

Impressive right? But the number that matters most isn't on this list. It's the count of hours not spent by our customers reading through statutes, laws, citations to find the one clause or legal requirement that actually applies to them. Ten years of that adds up.

What we've learned along the way

A few things stand out looking back:

Regulation is a moving target, not a snapshot. The compliance problem isn't "what does the law say today?" It's "what does the law say today, what did it say last month, and what will it say when the next drought declaration or heat alert hits?"

Context matters more than content. A regulation is only relevant if it applies to this site, doing this activity, in this jurisdiction. Generic legal databases missed that from the beginning. Filtering by relevance turned out to be the core of the product, not a nice-to-have.

The best compliance software respects the person using it. EHS managers never needed us to lecture them about regulation. They needed us to hand them the specific obligations that applied to their site, evidence them properly, and get out of the way.

Plan, Check, Verify

Ten years in, our belief remains the same: compliance isn't a one-time task. It's a live discipline. That's why ERM Libryo is built around three stages that reflect how compliance actually works: Plan, Check, and Verify.

ERM Libryo Sites helps organizations cut through regulatory complexity, identifying the specific obligations that apply to each site, tracking changes as they happen, and managing the actions needed to stay on top of them. No more 400-page statutes. No more guesswork. See more

ERM Libryo Assess takes it further, enabling structured audits, inspections, and assessments that turn compliance activity into clear, evidenced performance, closing the loop between knowing your obligations and proving you're meeting them. Learn more

Whether you're building your compliance foundation or looking to strengthen how you evaluate and evidence it, both solutions are designed to meet your teams where they are and grow with you from there.

The next chapter starts now

If the first decade of Libryo was about proving that site-specific regulatory intelligence could scale, the next is about proving what it looks like with AI woven through every step.

That's the work happening right now: AI-powered search, requirements summaries, permit parsing, agentic ingestion frameworks, and, quietly running underneath it, a rebuild that puts AI at the core rather than bolted on top. Regulation itself is also getting faster (climate-driven rules are rewriting compliance in real time), and the tools have to keep up. We're building for that.

Despite the AI revolution, humans will always play a vital part in EHS regulation: judgment, relationships, and accountability. That's something only humans can decide and the balance we're carrying into year eleven.

Finally, thank you

Ten years is a long time for an idea to survive, and it doesn't happen without the people who chose to be part of it: the customers, partners and investors who trusted an unproven product; the team members who joined when we were smaller and quieter and stuck with us through turbulent times; the ERM colleagues who believed in us; and the community that supports us. All we ask, is to continue providing your honest feedback, which helps us make Libryo better.

Curious what site-specific regulatory intelligence looks like ten years in the making? Get in touch with the Libryo team.