Building the Backbone of Responsible Mining: Meet Karen Chovan, CEO of CI-RiskDB by Enviro

tl;dr

• Karen Chovan, CEO of CI-RiskDB by Enviro, is closing the knowledge gap that lets mining disasters happen, one platform at a time.

• After 25+ years managing mine waste risk, she watched the same failure repeat itself.

• A market collapse triggered by the Fukushima disaster pushed her out of the corporate world and, eventually, into building her own company.

Karen Chovan has spent her career around infrastructure that has to last forever, in conditions that never stop changing. Mine waste facilities don't get a margin for error, and after 25 years working inside that reality, she knew exactly where the cracks were forming. They weren't in the engineering. They were in communication.

When Knowledge Walks Out the Door

Across sites, corporate roles, and consulting work around the world, Karen kept running into the same pattern: critical knowledge scattered across people, systems, and time, with too much of it living in someone's head or buried in an old email thread. Every minesite used different engineers, different methods, different ways of doing things, making it nearly impossible to compare risk or communicate what mattered most to leadership. "I realized mining companies needed a way to operationalize and standardize governance so they could consistently apply what they already knew," she says. That realization became CI-RiskDB.

The Decision That Started It All

Karen's path to founder wasn't gradual. She was climbing steadily inside a major mining organization, on the leadership watch list, when the 2011 tsunami off Japan took out a nuclear power plant and sent the uranium market into freefall. Her team was cut, their work shelved, and she was left to sit inside a company running lean with nothing to build. The stress made her physically ill. After months of that, she left, unsure of what came next but certain she couldn't stay.

What followed surprised her. She'd never seen herself as a tech founder, and assumed the software would be the hardest part to figure out. Instead, the harder work was earning trust in a new product and changing how an industry thinks. Along the way, she taught herself sales, marketing, and how to lead a team, calling it less bravery than "something that needs doing."

The sacrifices haven't been small. Global travel, long stretches away from family, fewer friends, and a founder's version of financial uncertainty. She carries a calm exterior through all of it. "People think I'm so calm, that nothing upsets me," she says, "but you might be surprised to find that I'm the shark that's been hiding below the waves all along."

What keeps her going is simple: mining failures cost lives and communities, and better decision-making can prevent that. Ten years from now, she hopes the industry is defined by good stewardship instead of headline-making catastrophes, and that governance is treated as a strategic capability rather than a box to check.

Why Her Story Matters

Karen didn't choose this work because it was easy. She chose it because she'd seen, up close, what happens when knowledge doesn't reach the people who need it in time. At Disruption Magazine, we celebrate founders like Karen Chovan, who turn decades of hard-earned expertise into the systems an entire industry depends on.