The largest organizations (1000+ employees) on average use at least 177 SaaS applications to run various parts of their operations. Each of these integrations represents a potential security risk as organizations entrust third-party vendors with sensitive data. This information security concern is addressed through SOC2, an auditing protocol built on five key principles to ensure vendors are appropriately managing and protecting the customer data and the data of their clients. Laika is an end-to-end compliance platform that enables software and tech providers to be fully compliant with all requirements through automation. In addition to SOC2, the platform also handles ISO 27001, GDPR, PCI DSS, and HIPAA requirements, making it versatile across a broad array of industry users. Compliance with enterprise requirements can be a daunting proposition for smaller providers that don’t have the internal resources to dedicate to compliance teams but absolutely critical if these companies want to sell into larger organizations. Laika allows companies of all sizes to offload this burden with an industry-leading and secure solution that brings down the cost of compliance and also is powerful enough to offer continuous monitoring as organizations scale, coupled with expert guidance along the way.
AlleyWatch caught up with Laika Founder and Co-CEO Austin Ogilvie to learn more about the business, the company’s strategic plans, latest round of funding, which brings the total funding raised to $98M, and much, much more…
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
We raised $50M Series C financing. The round was led by Fin Capital and joined by Centana Growth Partners and existing investors, Third Prime, Canapi Ventures, JPMorgan Growth Equity Partners, and others.
Tell us about the product or service that Laika offers.
Laika is the leading digital compliance platform, combining continuous control monitoring, IT audits, vendor assessments, and compliance workflows tools in one.
Customers use Laika to manage data security, privacy, and control day-to-day to ensure compliance issues are identified in real time and remediated quickly. Additionally, Laika gives customers powerful tools to demonstrate compliance with a variety of security and privacy standards most frequently encountered by scaling technology companies when processing or storing sensitive data.
What inspired the start of Laika?
Laika was borne from the frustration my cofounders and I felt in our prior lives. Sam and I come from similar professional backgrounds. We both built enterprise software companies before–Sam built an insurtech company called Zinc, and I built a data science company called Yhat. We both encountered compliance challenges that were difficult, time-consuming, and costly to solve in contracting with enterprise customers.
In my case, my flagship product was an infrastructure product for machine learning and customers included Intuit, J&J, Square, and several other big names. To big enterprise customers like that, the interface between their own security environment and ours as a potential SaaS vendor is an essential question. And shortcomings in our cybersecurity capabilities, lack of robust controls around access, resiliency, and recovery, etc. cost me millions in delays and lost deals. More than once, a prospective customer called off an entire implementation of my product even after having invested more than four months integrating all our APIs because we either didn’t have specific security controls or were unable to sufficiently demonstrate that them.
Sam has many of his own such stories about his journey too. So really that’s how the two of us became so interested in building solutions to tackle some of these challenges. Eva came to be interested in this space having seen the same movie but from the enterprise side. She spent two decades running various compliance, infosec/privacy control, and governance functions at Citigroup. She was energized by the opportunity to help equip technology companies to meet the increasingly high bar for what Citi and others have come to expect as table stakes when it comes to vendor risk management. She left Citi in 2014 and formed a boutique consultancy helping companies like Sam and my prior startups adopt best practices and be enterprise-ready earlier.
How is Laika different?
Laika is the only solution that combines turn-by-turn guidance to set up your controls, real-time control monitoring, simple-to-use workflows for employee on/offboarding, risk assessments, and fully integrated SOC 2 audits all within the same platform.
Laika brings together what would otherwise require a half dozen (or more) point solutions. Plus, Laika is the only compliance-as-a-service subscription that includes expert compliance services through a dedicated Compliance Architect to help customers reach their compliance goals at no additional cost.
Laika brings together what would otherwise require a half dozen (or more) point solutions. Plus, Laika is the only compliance-as-a-service subscription that includes expert compliance services through a dedicated Compliance Architect to help customers reach their compliance goals at no additional cost.
Others in the space paint compliance as an enemy. We want to flip that to help customers get value through digital compliance. We’re building a space where compliance is a good thing, enabling customers to grow their businesses as seamlessly and holistically as possible.
Handling data responsibly is key to not only closing deals but also key to building strong relationships and trust with partners and customers. Ultimately, mature security and privacy compliance has a strong ripple effect on the industry, and we’re committed to helping our customers collectively raise the bar collectively.
What market does Laika target and how big is it?
Laika is trusted by emerging cloud-native companies across all industries and sizes.
We have customers across SaaS + business applications, developer tools, information services + data services, laboratory equipment..you name it. It really runs the gamut. If you are selling essentially any b2b product today, you are almost certainly subjected to some kind of security and/or privacy requirements.
What’s your business model?
Simple annual subscription model.
How are you preparing for a potential economic slowdown?
COVID really accelerated the already shifting tide towards remote-first and/or hybrid remote/office work even among big corporates.
SaaS and cloud adoption has surged in this new workforce paradigm as virtually every company has had to step into a far more significant digital existence under lockdown.
Our space–the security and privacy compliance–has really become essential to this whole shift. So, while we are paying close attention to market signals, we’ve been super thoughtful and calculated with our capitalization strategy and managing our spend since day #1. We’re in it for the long haul and have built a robust business and are well-positioned.
What was the funding process like?
We have built a great relationship with Fin, the lead investor, for more than a year. Over a prolonged period of time, they got us excited about working with them. Equally, they had plenty of time to get to know us and our business.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
We’ve been very fortunate to have grown significantly over the past few years. The consistency of growth, I think, played a big role in getting them excited to invest. Fin is particularly active in the fintech space which also helped since essentially all fintech companies need to comply with digital standards like SOC 2 and ISO 27001. As investors, they just had outsized background knowledge of our space given the large number of their portfolio companies that have tackled compliance “the hard way” in the past.
We’ve been very fortunate to have grown significantly over the past few years. The consistency of growth, I think, played a big role in getting them excited to invest. Fin is particularly active in the fintech space which also helped since essentially all fintech companies need to comply with digital standards like SOC 2 and ISO 27001. As investors, they just had outsized background knowledge of our space given the large number of their portfolio companies that have tackled compliance “the hard way” in the past.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
On the growth side, we’re expanding to new markets in Europe and expanding our marketing and sales teams to support that effort. On the product side, we have a number of exciting releases planned…stay tuned
What advice can you offer companies in New York that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
Demand for venture capital exceeds supply?! Founders – tighten your belts, sure. but don’t panic. Just keep solving problems for customers and building what they want.
When capital was more available it was talent in short supply. it’s always something. Tune out the noise and focus.
Look around the table–you got this.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
Stay tuned – we have some exciting things in store for our customers. Not quite ready to talk about all that we are cookin’ up though.
What’s your favorite restaurant in the city?
Fausto in Prospect Heights / Park Slope. Or Sunny’s in Red Hook.
