Johanna Behm and Jani Björklund met at SLUSH 2017 in Helsinki, on the event's sustainability team, sorting waste and guiding visitors on recycling. They did not plan to start a company. They talked about data, about systems, about the gap between what people intend and what actually happens when you scale human activity to tens of thousands of people in one building. Then they went their separate ways.

Jani pursued a PhD in machine learning and AI, building perception systems for drones, developing expertise in one of the hardest problems in data science: extracting reliable signal from fragmented, noisy, real-world inputs that were never designed to be compared. Johanna built a career organizing events across Europe and North America for Fortune 500 and biotech companies, and came to see live events as one of the most unspoken sources of carbon emissions on the planet.

They stayed in touch sporadically, trading notes on tech. Jani taught Johanna to code in Python and Java, and while she settled into selling the vision while he built, she kept learning, working with people in ML and AI and building her own projects on Kaggle datasets, until she was technically fluent in her own right.

They reconnected, and spent a year interviewing venues across North America, Europe, and Asia before writing the first line of code. They sat with sustainability managers from Oregon to Orlando and found the same thing everywhere: the problems are universal, and they are solvable. In 2024, they incorporated Envire.