Venminder has raised $25M in total. We talk with its team and CEO, James Hyde.
PetaCrunch: How would you describe Venminder in a single tweet?
Venminder: Venminder is a provider of SaaS-based third party risk management solutions to companies that want an “all-in-one” partner to optimize and streamline processes.
PC: How did it all start and why?
V: Our lineage comes from being a high-risk vendor selling to financial institutions (iPay Technologies) – where many of our team learned first-hand the complexity and importance of managing a sound compliant program. There was a market gap for a complete platform integrated with due diligence services that could really streamline best practices or meet industry regulations and so Venminder was born. With our background in the strictest of regulations, we’ve been able to build out the best platform that can guide users through vendor onboarding, due diligence, contract negotiation, questionnaires and much more. Ultimately, we’ve been able to save organizations time, money, resources and ensure that they have the right practices and processes in place to mitigate vendor risk.
PC: What have you achieved so far?
V: Today, we have over 700 customers partnered with us and 110 employees. We also have an industry brand recognition as the leading thought leader for third party risk management – where we are not only teaching the best practices but defining them.
We provide immediate value. From the day our customers sign up, we start streamlining and organizing their third party risk management program to get them into a better position where they can comply with regulations and achieve today’s best practices.
Our customer retain rate of 95% speaks volumes and is something we are extremely proud of. We are strong believers in that our customer success is our success. Our churn is literally only as a result of M&A. Our customers engage and partner with us for the longterm.
Venminder is in particular experiencing rapid growth with large enterprise-grade companies that want an “all-in-one” partner to help optimize and streamline processes. These are some of the largest organizations in the country and they are finding that our tool is the most robust on the market and the ability to access fast due diligence services is valuable to them.
PC: How will you use your recent funding round?
V: Our funding round was led by our existing investors, Bain Capital Ventures and MissionOG, and we are planning to use the funds to accelerate the development of enhancements for very large enterprises that have unique requirements in oversight. We are completely dedicated to third party risk management so we are constantly staying on top of regulatory action to proactively meet what the industry needs and ensure our platform has all the best features. We are not an ERM platform, which only has a small vendor management component (often with very limited functionality). The regulators message has been very clear – they specifically call out and detail what they expect to see in a vendor risk management program. Failure to meet their expectations can lead to enforcement actions, hefty fines or could leave you open to third party breaches which typically severely damage not just that third party’s reputation but your own since you chose to do business with them. The level of detail that regulators and today’s best practices require can all be met with our platform. I should mention that we are committed to offering API integration to our platform – in May of this year we actually released an interoperability with RSA Archer’s Third Party Risk Governance solution.
PC: What do you plan to achieve in the next 2-3 years?
V: Venminder has an exciting future ahead. We plan to continue to scale the business, double the number of customers that we serve and expand our thought leadership investment. We plan to remain the “go-to” leader for all things related to third party risk.
