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According to a Gartner’s report, about 75% of compliance leaders say they still lack the confidence to effectively run and report on program outcomes despite the added scrutiny on data privacy and protection and newly added regulations over the last several years. San Francisco-based startup anecdotes developed a compliance operating system platform to provide customized compliance services for businesses. 

“The [compliance] tools available to [users] now are essentially templates for meeting basic requirements and passing audits, offering very little in the way of the scalability and customization needed to facilitate, versus hinder, growth,” said Yair Kuznitsov, co-founder and CEO of anecdotes. “By breaking down siloed processes, replacing outdated manual activities with automation and establishing an underlying fabric via which compliance posture can be monitored and understood at all times, we transform compliance from a burden into a driver for growth and expansion.”

Today, anecdotes announced that it has raised $25 million in a Series A round to develop new applications for its compliance operating system platform, specifically tailored to fast-growing clients’ needs. 

The funding news comes on the heels of its 175% increase in post-IPO commercial customers after raising $5 million in seed funding in February 2021. The startup had commercial agreements with Similarweb, Riskified, Fiverr, Unity and more. 

The startup added 70 integrations with identity providers, security tools, collaboration software, ticketing and cloud infrastructures platforms in 2021 alone. 

Anecdotes was founded in 2020 by Kuznitsov, CPO Roi Amior and R&D VP Eitan Adler, who all come from a cybersecurity background and have knowledge about data-based compliance. 

Anecdotes says it continuously collects and maps data from AWS, Snowflake, Cloudflare, GitHub, Datadog and more. The data is then leveraged to power various applications for compliance needs like audit management, risk analysis, policies and customer evidence. Through its customized controls and frameworks, companies can meet internal and external audits and have the visibility, flexibility and data-backed intelligence to simultaneously scale their compliance program against their own impressive growth. 

Founders of anecdotes (from left to right): CTO Eitan Adler, CEO Yair Kuznitsov, CPO Roi Amior. Image Credits: anecdotes

The Series A funding was led by Red Dot Capital Partners, with participation from Vintage Investment Partners, Shasta Ventures, Glilot Capital Partners and Aleph. Barak Salomon and Atad Peled of Red Dot will join anecdotes’ board of directors as part of this round. 

The company, which has R&D offices in Israel, plans to open a new office in New York and double its team from 60 to 120, hiring globally. 

“There is an insatiable appetite for data protection and privacy today. And yet, most compliance leaders rely on basic and outdated technology like spreadsheets or tedious manual labor to manage critical infrastructures and postures, essentially left to do their jobs with one hand tied behind their back in the process,” said Atad Peled, principal at Red Dot Capital Partners. “Getting through one audit once a year is one thing, but there remains a huge market gap in addressing needs beyond that for fast-growing companies with super complex and forever-evolving infrastructures on a regular basis. This is why anecdotes and its compliance OS system are so critical and directly primed for rapid growth.”

The anecdotes OS. Image Credits: anecdotes