It all started on the back of a napkin in San Francisco. RegScale’s co-founder (Anil Karmel) and I had just finished a long day leading a big digital transformation project in the national security space, where we were buried in manual compliance paperwork and multi-week audit and review cycles. It was exhausting work, felt very low value and distracting, and we both really need a drink (or a bottle, if we’re being honest).

Being engineering-minded, we couldn’t help but start to envision a world where somebody would automate this tedious work so nobody else had to go through a day like this. We even started sketching out the early ideas of RegScale on the back of a napkin about how it might work, and then we proceeded to put it on a shelf while we went back to our day jobs. Over the next decade, I had the opportunity to roll out and experience some of the best legacy GRC tools on the planet. However, they all suffered from the same manual problems we laid out on that napkin a decade ago. Eventually, the frustration built to the point where we just said, screw it, we will do it…. and that is how RegScale began.