A local serial entrepreneur who started an online-compliance startup at the peak of the pandemic, now has $4 million in venture capital to grow the business and its focus on diversity and transparency.
Sravish Sridhar, who has founded of three previous companies — Seven Numerals, We Flap and Kinvey — has always focused on IT solutions for web and mobile applications, across a range of vertical markets, including healthcare, pharma, insurance, manufacturing, energy and construction.
We Flap is the outlier of the bunch, serving as a nonprofit catered to online philanthropic efforts focused on helping non-governmental organizations, or NGOs, across the world.
“I’m a fourth-generation entrepreneur and the quirky thing in my family is that every generation seeks to do our own thing, unlike the generation before," Sridhar said. "I’ve only done technology startups throughout my whole career."
Sridhar’s latest venture is Kintent, which offers a compliance platform that analyzes a company's ability to quickly set up, test and audit for security and compliance certifications. It also serves a company’s needs to auto-generate responses to security questionnaires, and share compliance data with enterprise customers.
Kintent customers include AtScale, Clipchamp, Evisort, InsideTracker, MachineMetrics and Notarize. Each company uses the platform to accelerate sales by streamlining numerous time-consuming security and data privacy compliance workflows with automatic questionnaire responses, audits and transparent audit obligations.
Kintent operates in a similar way to TurboTax, but instead of users filling out personal-finance information, businesses are filling out their consumer data and their products, then Kintent uses APIs to determine how best to provide the company what it requires. The level of Trust Cloud’s assistance varies on how large the company is, where errors might be found in its data-collection, and so on.
Transparency, diversity
In Sridhar’s 20-plus years in consumer technology and startup operations, he’s learned that transparency is key to operating a successful enterprise.
“Publicly, everyone says ‘You can trust me’ or ‘Trust is a value in my company,’ but they can never prove it when asked a simple question. I wanted to build a business that enabled a trustworthy organization,” Sridhar said.
As an Indian American immigrant, Sridhar watched the diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, efforts in companies following George Floyd’s murder last year. He said he found a lot of entrepreneurs and leaders talking about DEI, but not following up with action.
"We all say these things on social media, but no one was really doing them,” Sridhar said.
Tola Capital is a Seattle-based venture capitalist firm looking to invest in more Boston startups, particularly ones that focus on diverse hiring.
For Sridhar, diversity in hiring means seeking people outside of one’s immediate community. He suggests doing so by having a hiring process that intentionally seeks out various ethic/racial backgrounds, and then following that with equal pay despite gender or race, and having clear guidelines for how co-workers treat one another. Kintent’s Boston-based team is small, with 16 employees of different genders and ethnic backgrounds, he said.
“You can say you do all of these things, but if you do not report updates to your team or the public, it does not matter,” Sridhar said.
