COVID-19 Driving Urgency for Third-Party Risk Visibility, Market Leader Interos Growing

COVID-19 has dictated that companies across all industries urgently reevaluate third-party risk associated with their complex global supply chains and web of global business partners. Real-time, continuous monitoring of the health and stability of a company’s hundreds or thousands of business partners was virtually impossible before. Interos has cracked the code with the first and only AI-powered multi-tier, multi-factor third-party risk management platform. The company, today, announced unprecedented company and customer growth along with the hiring of a new Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and a new Chief Revenue Officer (CRO).

Since the start of major COVID-19 outbreaks in the US in March 2020, Interos has seen a 500% increase in inbound requests from current and prospective customers, which has played a major role in 961% revenue growth since January 2019. In March 2020, the company also announced plans to triple year-over-year sales growth alongside a $20MM Series B funding round.

“We’ve built the world’s largest business relationship graph, providing organizations with a multi-tiered picture of the level of risk and opportunity associated with their global business ecosystem,” said Jennifer Bisceglie, founder and CEO of Interos. “Before COVID-19, organizations knew they had a dangerous blind spot beyond tier-one suppliers and business partners but didn’t know how to solve it. Based on a deluge of inbound inquiries into our capabilities since March, it’s clear from conversations that the pandemic has made it a Board-level imperative to fix this quickly. This is a big data problem; operational resiliency is only feasible via comprehensive, continuous monitoring, and the application of AI.”

According to a recent Gartner report, out of the 60% of global companies and organizations that work with more than 1,000 third parties, only 27% perform ongoing monitoring and only 2% directly monitor fourth and fifth tier suppliers. By applying AI and machine learning, Interos currently monitors over 50 million entities globally across 85,000 data sources, processing 250 million risk events per month. This unprecedented visibility enables organizations to make decisions on how to reduce the impact of risk, quickly, and as it happens; compress supplier due diligence processes from months to minutes; and ensure the resilience of the most complex global supply chains and brands. Interos monitors suppliers across five key risk factors – financial, operational, governance, geographic, and cybersecurity with over 60 associated variables and growing.

“For many years, enterprises have collectively over-indexed on the cost side of the equation at the expense of risk and other value levers. This has left most supply chains facing massive unseen risk caused by a lack of visibility, interpretation, and action,” said Dr. Elouise Epstein, vice president at strategic consulting firm Kearney and noted procurement expert. “The way forward is to implement intelligent risk monitoring, overlaid with good strategy, and clear actioning -- ideally autonomously.”

To support Interos’ rapid growth in the market, the company has expanded its staff by over 40% so far this year and has projected to grow by 160% YoY in 2020. New executive hires include Noel Calhoun, CTO, who will head up Interos’ AI efforts. Calhoun previously served as CTO of the Central Intelligence Agency and most recently as CTO of Kensho Technologies, an S&P Global Company. Interos has also welcomed Eric Johnson as CRO. Johnson has led North American software sales teams at Sybase, SAP, and global sales teams at Blackberry and, most recently, Marketo (an Adobe company).