For many leaders, GRC (Governance, Risk and Compliance) remains a time-consuming checkbox exercise. But for Girish Redekar, Co-Founder and CEO of Sprinto, compliance isn’t a barrier; it’s a “trust currency” that can win RFPs, speed up sales and protect valuations. After bootstrapping RecruiterBox to 2,500+ customers, Girish has applied his “engineer the system” philosophy to the world of compliance.
Today, Sprinto’s AI-native platform helps over 3,000 companies across 75 countries stay audit-ready in real-time. In this exclusive interview for Management-Issues, we discuss Sprinto’s journey and learn why the most successful companies are using compliance as a strategic tool for competitive advantage and good governance.
Q: You bootstrapped RecruiterBox to more than 2,500 customers before selling the business. Looking back on that journey now, what stands out as the most important lessons?
Girish Redekar: I didn't have outside money, so I could not afford to chase shiny ideas or hide behind vanity metrics. As a result, I learnt pretty quickly to focus on solving the problems that clients felt sharply. Pain is the ultimate compass. That discipline hardwired me to hunt for high-pain, high-frequency problems.
This is exactly what motivated me to launch Sprinto. Based on widespread frustration around compliance, I saw that there was a problem to be solved and decided to dedicate myself to resolving this next.
The second lesson was that efficiency compounds. Bootstrapping forced me to automate ruthlessly, document everything and build systems that scaled before the team did. Every hour had to count. That mindset still shapes how I build companies - treat the organisation like an engineered system, eliminate friction early and never rely on heroics.
Q: For business leaders who see compliance as a cost center or checkbox exercise, how do you make the case that compliance can be a competitive advantage?
Girish Redekar: Compliance and GRC spend is closer to your marketing budget than your facilities management spend. It's not an overhead; it's a trust currency that opens doors.
Any modern business increasingly relies on other businesses to operate, and all those interactions share digital data in the process. This digital data is exploding, which brings with it an increased need to trust that other stakeholders will do what's necessary to protect this data.
Strong compliance also provides fast-track access. You can skip the security review queue where you'd otherwise be stuck for weeks. You get into RFPs others can't even enter. You gain access to highly regulated markets that are barriers for your competitors. Your sales team wins on reliability instead of discounting.
The other hidden advantage is operational. Good compliance forces clarity - who owns what? What's risky? What's controlled? This discipline lets you expand into regulated industries, enter new geographies and stay ready for partnerships or M&A. Investors can also see that a company with solid, continuously provable trust carries lower execution risk and better growth prospects.
Q: In those early conversations with potential customers what surprised you most about how companies were handling compliance?
Girish Redekar: How manual it still was. Smart teams were running compliance like it was 2005: screenshots, spreadsheets and inbox archaeology. And they were spending more time proving compliance than improving security.
I was also surprised by the drag this created in every direction. Sales deals slowed down to a crawl, product launches slipped and expansions stalled. Risk teams were stuck in month-long loops trying to verify vendors and their vendors. Even the word "audit" caused anxiety.
One compliance leader told me: “I became the person nobody wanted to see coming,” but a few months later after we automated the time consuming, manual processes, he said something even better: “Now people pull me into decisions early because I’m finally helping them move faster, not slower.”
Q: You've recently launched what you're calling ' breakthrough AI capabilities' including the AI Playground and Ask AI. What makes them different and how are they changing the way compliance teams actually work day-to-day?
Girish Redekar: Most AI features are bolted-on, but ours is baked into workflows. Ask AI gives teams instant, context-aware answers. It knows exactly which policy, risk, vendor or control you're looking at - no more digging through documentation.
The AI Playground goes further. Think of it as your workshop. Teams can build their own no-code automations, summarize policies, analyse vendor questionnaires, score risks or generate remediation plans all without waiting on engineering.
When the repetitive work handles itself, teams can focus on decisions and not data prep.
Q: The majority of compliance leaders have faced consequences from third-party risks in the past year. As companies rely more heavily on vendors and contractors, what should business leaders be doing differently to manage third-party compliance risks?
Girish Redekar: One CISO framed it to me perfectly: stop treating vendor risk like an annual ritual. In today's fast-paced environments, a once-a-year questionnaire is like a 10-year-old selfie.
You need systems that continuously monitor your vendors in the background, pull evidence automatically and alert you the moment something’s not quite right. It's the difference between checking the smoke alarm once a year and having one that goes off the moment there's real danger.
You can also get blindsided by the vendors behind your vendors. The billing service behind your HER or cloud platform behind your telehealth app. You need to map that chain so that third-party risk doesn't feel like guesswork.
Treat your vendor ecosystem like a supply chain, not a contact list. Build a dependency map, tier critical services and make trust queryable across the chain. In this way, you’ll be able to answer: "What do we rely on? what changed? and where are we exposed?" without a month-long email hunt.
Right now, too many companies discover fourth-party risk the way you discover a leak - after the fact.
Q: At a time when compliance teams are facing budget reductions, regulatory complexity is increasing. For leaders being asked to 'do more with less,' what's your advice on where to focus limited resources for maximum impact?
Girish Redekar: Use humans for judgment and software for repetition. More specifically, the best-in-class organisations are integrating tools into a single platform instead of stitching together point solutions and spreadsheets. An all-in-one platform that automates evidence collection, monitors controls, maps vendor dependencies, and answers security questionnaires can eliminate the tasks that can take hours and slow the business down.
This then frees up the team to spend their time and energy where it actually matters: unblocking the business. The goal isn't to do more with less. It's to stop doing work that never should have been manual in the first place.
Q;The EU's NIS2 Directive takes effect in 2026 and will impact US firms doing business in Europe. What's the biggest challenge it presents for business leaders, and how should they prepare?
Girish Redekar: The most challenging change is accountability. NIS2 raises expectations around cybersecurity governance, incident reporting and supply-chain oversight.
It also pushes responsibility up to leadership. Unlike previous EU directives, NIS2 requires executive-level responsibility, stricter incident reporting timelines and verifiable evidence of security controls across the entire supply chain. Policies on paper won't cut it. Regulators will expect measurable, continuously monitored practices and proof that third-party risks must also be actively managed. The consequences for compliance gaps include fines and personal liability for executives - this is far stricter than what firms are used to.
It’s important to prepare so get real-time visibility into your security posture now. Automate evidence collection. Tighten vendor monitoring. Map which parts of your business actually fall under NIS2 - IT, critical services, data centres, cloud infrastructure, SaaS products. And make sure leadership understands what this directive requires of them personally.
Q: Compliance can slow down product launches and market expansion. How can business leaders balance the need for speed with compliance requirements without compromising either?
Girish Redekar: Compliance slows launches when it's treated as an overhead. This happens when teams build something first and only afterwards ask for approvals, evidence and vendor checks.
The fix is to embed compliance from the start and turn it into a smoke alarm, not a fire drill: an always-on system that keeps running in the background. Then by the time you're ready to ship, you're not "starting compliance," you're just confirming you've stayed inside the lines.
Speed and compliance stop being trade-offs when trust is always current.
Q: Compliance issues are increasingly derailing M&A deals or causing major valuation adjustments. What compliance red flags should business leaders watch for during due diligence?
Girish Redekar: Red flags in M&A usually cluster around weak trust signals. This is common when compliance is a paper posture - spreadsheets, screenshots, and self-reported policies that may not match reality. Gaps in monitoring, data handling, AI usage, or vendor oversight often surface during diligence, and become expensive after the deal closes.
The other category is structural drag. Long security review cycles. Constant scurrying for audits. An inability to produce evidence quickly. This indicates a fragile system - dependent on a few people and a scramble cycle. In regulated industries, this drag can slow integrations, delay growth plans, and necessitate valuation adjustments once the actual cost of cleanup becomes apparent.
In diligence, buyers aren't just buying revenue - they're buying execution risk. Compliance is where that risk shows up fast.
Q: How are leading companies using compliance certifications to win deals and enter new markets faster than competitors?
Girish Redekar: They treat certifications like a passport, not a trophy. Because many RFPs require SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR or HIPAA upfront, these companies maintain a continuous audit-ready posture. They submit proofs instantly and security reviews clear in hours while competitors can spend weeks chasing questionnaires.
They also use certifications as keys to new markets. A startup with SOC 2 and HIPAA can sell into regulated industries years earlier. A fintech with strong compliance can partner with banks without friction. Healthcare vendors with the right certifications skip months of vendor verification.
Staying ahead on compliance means entering new markets first and it also means you can quickly turn trust into a genuine competitive advantage.
Q: You achieved a 'Great Place to Work' certification relatively early in your journey, so this was clearly a priority. What do you think people who work at Sprinto appreciate most about the company?
Girish Redekar: Trust and agency. People are given real problems, real autonomy and we also set a high bar. We move fast and make bold bets. If someone has an idea, they're encouraged to push it forward and turn it into something actionable rather than wait for permission or work through layers of approval.
Teams push hard, but they also have each other's backs. Ambition is encouraged. The simplest way to describe this is: build what you think is useful, ship it, and see if it makes a difference to customers. This isn't for everyone, but for a certain kind of person, it can quickly become addictive.
