Neno
Duplan

In 1999, when most technology companies were racing to put pet food on the internet, Neno Duplan deployed something quieter and stranger: the world's first commercial Software-as-a-Service product for environmental information management. No fanfare. No venture capital. Just a system that would let corporations, governments, and utilities track, analyze, and report their environmental footprints in the cloud - years before anyone called it the cloud.

Duplan runs Locus Technologies from Mountain View, California. The company he founded on April 11, 1997 now serves over 11,000 active users and maintains a 98% annual customer renewal rate - a figure that most enterprise software founders would trade their term sheets for. He built it without raising a venture round. His first credit line - $250,000 from Bank of America - came not from a formal pitch but from a conversation at a social event with the San Francisco branch manager. A handshake, not a deck.

The stubbornness encoded in that origin story runs through everything Locus does. The company has been profitable through industry downturns that wiped out better-funded competitors. The EHS (environmental, health, and safety) software market is littered with the remnants of roll-up strategies - larger players acquiring smaller ones, hollowing them out, losing the institutional knowledge that made them work. Duplan has watched it happen, and written about it with pointed clarity.

The intellectual roots of Locus Technologies go back further than 1997. In the 1980s, as a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University, Duplan built the first prototype system for an environmental information management database. The thesis became the company. The company became an institution. Carnegie Mellon noticed: in 2019, they named him the Civil and Environmental Engineering Distinguished Alumni of the year.

Before CMU, there was the Adriatic coast of Croatia - then Yugoslavia - where Duplan grew up. Before Silicon Valley, there was Genoa, Italy in 1981, where he worked at a nuclear power plant. Before Mountain View, there was Brussels, where he worked on nuclear projects across Europe. The arc from nuclear risk management to environmental software transparency is not incidental. Understanding what goes wrong when dangerous materials aren't tracked carefully tends to sharpen the focus on what data collection systems can prevent.

Locus Technologies' early innovations read now like a forecast of the industry's direction. First cloud-based EHS system in 1999. First EHS mobile application in 2000. First integrated EHS portal in 2001. First web-based GIS for environmental data in 2003. First user-configurable drag-and-drop EHS platform in 2013. Each of these firsts arrived before the broader market was ready - and before most of Locus's future competitors existed. By the time those competitors arrived, Locus had a decade of operational knowledge they couldn't replicate by writing a check.

The company's current product suite reflects how that early vision has expanded. Locus serves oil and gas, chemical, pharmaceutical, manufacturing, utilities, and government sectors. Its platforms handle greenhouse gas emissions tracking, water quality management, air emissions reporting, hazardous waste tracking, PFAS monitoring, stormwater management, ESG disclosure reporting (including CSRD and SB253 compliance), and facility asset management. In May 2026, the company released a significantly enhanced GIS+ mapping solution - continuing a pattern of product depth over marketing breadth.

Outside the office, Duplan writes. His Medium essays tackle the future of rivers, the politics of emissions data ownership, the slow destruction of EHS software quality through acquisition strategies, and the molecular future of climate change. The essay "Who Controls Your Emissions Data - Beati Possidentes" (December 2022) is a pointed examination of data sovereignty in environmental reporting - who owns the numbers, who sets the standards, who benefits from opacity. The title invokes the legal concept that possession creates presumption of right. The implication: whoever holds your environmental data holds considerable power over how your compliance story gets told.

His daughter Siena earned her master's degree in Business Intelligence and Data Analytics from Carnegie Mellon in 2018 - the same institution where her father's prototype database became the intellectual seedling of a 27-year-old company. The family pattern of rigorous technical training at CMU is either coincidence or evidence that Duplan makes a persuasive case for institutional learning.

The latest chapter at Locus involves water utilities. The April 2025 release of Locus Water - dedicated AI-ready software for the water utility industry - reflects Duplan's read on where regulation and infrastructure investment are converging. Water quality monitoring, service order management, backflow prevention, and drinking water compliance are increasingly digitized mandates for utilities that have historically operated on paper and legacy systems. Locus is positioning itself as the platform where utilities modernize without surrendering their data sovereignty to a larger platform player.

Duplan has published more than 30 technical papers on technology applications in the environmental industry, has appeared on KNBR Business Radio, the Water Values Podcast, and the Bluefield Research podcast, and has been featured in multi-part interview series that trace his path from the Yugoslav coast to Silicon Valley. He holds a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of Zagreb, an M.S. from Carnegie Mellon, a B.S. from the University of Split, and completed advanced management training at Stanford.

The combination of deep technical training, European nuclear industry experience, and a decades-long bet on cloud-based environmental transparency has produced something unusual: a bootstrapped, founder-led, highly profitable software company in a market where most players either got acquired or ran out of runway. Locus Technologies is 27 years old and building new products. That is its own kind of proof of concept.