Tysons-based RegScale acquired fellow compliance startup GovReady

One year after its founding, Tysons Corner, Virginia-based company RegScale has just made its first M&A move.

RegScale announced Tuesday that it acquired Arlington, Virginia’s GovReady, a fellow compliance tech company that works in open source and compliance-as-code. Terms of the deal were not released. The company is headquartered in Virginia and has an R&D office in Knoxville, Tennessee.

With the merger, RegScale said it will be a leading OSCAL-enabled tech platform. OSCAL, a formatting set in XML, JSON and YAML, makes control catalogs, baselines, system security and assessment plans into machine-readable representations. RegScale and GovReady currently both use the technology as a foundation for their platforms.

Acquiring GovReady, RegScale CEO Anil Karmel told Technical.ly, means that customers can now fill out a questionnaire to create the documentation they need for compliance, opening up the company’s potential.

“[Compliance] is an area that hasn’t seen innovation in decades,” Karmel said. “We’re still doing compliance the same way. We really haven’t seen a lot of solutions that target the enterprise in the way in which we solve this problem, much less any that are completely free to get started. And that’s the value of bringing these two universes together.”

Through the deal, GovReady CEO Greg Elin will be RegScale’s new principal OSCAL engineer in Tennessee and compliance-as-code evangelist. In addition to founding GovReady, RegScale said Elin is a regular contributor to the OpenControl and other compliance tech communities and a workshop leader. He was also previously the first chief data officer and acting CIO at the Federal Communications Commission and helped create Sunlight Labs at the Sunlight Foundation. Additional members of the GovReady team will also join the R&D team in Tennessee, as well.

Karmel said that bringing Elin on the team and acquiring GovReady was an easy decision as both were embarking on the same journey: to reimagine the compliance world and bring tech into it.

“Both of our philosophies were aligned, in terms of outcomes,” Karmel said. “We’ve really been building a product around the same time [and] got ready to embark on creating the product around the same time. So, really it was a natural alignment of our journeys to bring together and join forces in this way.”

This latest development comes on the heels of RegScale’s $20 million Series A, which it announced in August. Led by SYN Ventures with additional participation from SineWave Ventures, Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation, SecureOctane and other strategic investors, Karmel said at the time that the funds would be spent on sales and marketing, product development and hiring.

The company also recently brought on two C-suite level executives: Larry Whiteside Jr. joined RegScale and chief information security officer and Eric Erston joined as the chief revenue officer.