RegScale: Cyber compliance company sets out to grow

Editor’s note: At the start of the year, we look at which young companies have caught our eye for hitting a milestone, bringing in funding or growing its revenue base. This company has made our list of our Startups to Watch for 2023. See them all here.

RegScale spun out of D.C.’s C2 Labs Inc. in 2021 and raised $1.5 million in its first year. The young company continues to raise funding as cybersecurity becomes a prominent focus for companies, no matter the industry.

Its software helps other companies manage their cybersecurity status in real time so they comply with federal regulations like the Defense Department’s updated Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification. The platform allows companies to make system audits, issue plans of action, assess risks, note upcoming deadlines and compliance tasks, and then delivers audit-ready documentation on demand for companies, freeing customers of manual, paper-based processes like Excel or Word docs to manage all the different regulations or cybersecurity mandates from different government agencies.

“Our platform is designed to help these organizations demonstrate CMMC compliance for a fraction of the time and cost it would take to do so manually,” said Anil Karmel, RegScale’s CEO. He counts 300,000 registrations for the free edition of its compliance software.

In late November, the Tysons startup acquired competitor GovReady, an Arlington firm, for undisclosed terms — a move that brings more expertise in designing compliance automation software into the organization as GovReady employees and CEO Greg Elin joined RegScale’s R&D team. GovReady’s knowledge of Open Security Control Assessment Language, the open source language that creates machine-readable representations of cybersecurity compliance protocol, is the secret sauce Karmel hopes makes it a market leader.

The acquisition came soon after RegScale’s August close of a $20 million Series A round led by West Palm Beach, Florida’s SYN Ventures, and D.C.’s SineWave Ventures, the Virginia Innovation Partnership Corp.’s venture fund, and San Francisco’s SecureOctane among the other investors.

Now over the course of 2023, the company said it will focus on doubling its 30-person size.

“Ultimately, cybersecurity is all of our jobs,” Karmel said. “Ensuring there is an easy way to demonstrate that we are indeed doing our jobs and being secure, by demonstrating compliance against regulations, helps everyone. Helps both industry and government to demonstrate that we’re meeting our important cybersecurity obligations.”

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