Today we’d like to introduce you to Travis Howerton
Hi Travis, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I spent most of my career in National Security where I retired as the first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of the U.S. Nuclear Weapons program. I then had various roles at Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL), Consolidated Nuclear Security (CNS – Y-12/Pantex), and Bechtel Corporation. I came to entrepreneurship later in life as I never really saw that as possible for me living in Knoxville, TN. With the world changing rapidly during COVID and the ability to work remotely going mainstream, venture capital options started to open up and we were able to raise a large Series A from SYN Ventures to find our Continuous Controls Monitoring (CCM) platform that seeks to disrupt the legacy Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) market.
I have loved every aspect of being an entrepreneur. The ability to innovate, to make decisions rapidly, and to build a company from scratch have been very professionally rewarding. In addition, we have been able to build RegScale in Knoxville, TN which has allowed me to spend much more time with my family and have a better work-life balance than I had in other corporate executive roles. Most rewarding to me personally is that we are building a blueprint for how you build a large, successful technology company in East Tennessee. Being born and raised here, it is important to me to create more opportunities in this area for top technology jobs and hope that technology can provide a path to a better life for many of our neighbors, just like it did for me.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
When RegScale went to market with the launch of our 1.0 product, we launched right at the start of the COVID global pandemic. After bootstrapping our development, cash was tight and it was very difficult to sell in an environment where nobody would meet in person. There were multiple times during this period where the company almost went under. Each time we were saved by just-in-time delivery of a key sale, the government small business subsidy to keep us alive during COVID, the win of a government SBIR grant, and finally, our first enterprise sale to a Fortune 100 company. The founders had to leverage online guerilla marketing, personal cold calls, grant writing, and every tool at their disposal to find creative ways to bring in revenue and keep the lights on long enough for the product to gain some initial market traction.
We were also blessed early on to partner with the University of Tennessee (UT). As sales started out slower than expected, the revenue to fund development was extremely tight. Even when we were working 80-100 weeks for months on end, enough progress could not be made without hiring additional developers. UT stepped in to help by providing entry level developers as recent graduates who hit the ground running and ready to work. They performed well beyond our expected skill level allowing us to make better than anticipated progress on our product roadmap even while on a very tight budget. Without UT’s support and partnership, RegScale would never have launched. UT was also gracious enough to allow us to move our R&D HQ into their research park providing convenient access to faculty and students as we continue to scale our business.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about RegScale?
RegScale is a tech startup company that was founded three years ago by Travis Howerton (current CEO) and Anil Karmel (former CEO). Since RegScale’s inception in November 2021, we have raised over $25 million – the largest software technology round ever raised in Knoxville – from top-tier venture capital firms.
RegScale’s Continuous Controls Monitoring (CCM) platform is an industry-first solution that allows organizations to automate regulatory compliance, cutting the time to certification by up to 90% and reducing audit preparation by 60%. RegScale’s AI-driven platform simplifies compliance management and enables companies and organizations to integrate compliance into their DevSecOps pipelines, bringing real-time visibility and risk mitigation across commercial and federal sectors.
RegScale empowers organizations to stay ahead of regulatory demands and proactively manage risk, making it a critical asset in today’s dynamic security and regulatory landscape.
RegScale has been instrumental in helping both commercial enterprises and federal and state agencies achieve faster compliance. For example, the platform enabled the U.S. Navy’s Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific (NIWC Pacific) to reduce onboarding time by 200,000% in its COSMOS program – an advanced cloud computing platform that accelerates the delivery of critical technologies to support the Department of Defense (DoD) mission and U.S. national security.
RegScale utilizes AI tools and compliance as code to lower program costs and eliminates the inefficiencies that hinder current GRC programs. Enterprises using RegScale improve the ROI of existing tools, achieve rapid certifications, anticipate threats via proactive risk management, automate evidence collection, integrate compliance into DevSecOps processes, and map controls faster. In the last year, RegScale has significantly increased its customer base and has over 450,000 downloads of its free Community Edition, exceeding all competitors’ adoption rates in this space by multiple orders of magnitude.
RegScale is a market leader in the Continuous Controls Monitoring (CCM) space, one of the newest areas that pique the interest of cyber security analysts at large research firms. This area is emerging tech and too new to have published leaders with well-defined market share, as Gartner (a well-respected global research and consulting firm) believes less than 5% of the market has fully adopted CCM technology to date. RegScale is considered an emerging CCM market leader with 13 Gartner research mentions in the past year (a Gartner record).
Though a small tech startup, RegScale has already obtained the highest security certifications across very complex compliance frameworks, including FedRAMP and DoD IL5, a milestone that only eight other companies in the world have been able to accomplish.
RegScale is pioneering work in Continuous Controls Monitoring (CCM), setting new industry standards, and demonstrating leadership and technological excellence in a rapidly evolving field.
What are your plans for the future?
By 2030, RegScale predicts that manual IT processes will be obsolete in keeping up with regulatory changes. Its vision is to provide continuous, real-time monitoring, at the code level, allowing organizations to stay ahead of compliance requirements while simultaneously managing cybersecurity threats.
RegScale envisions a future where compliance becomes an integrated, automated, and proactive process embedded within every aspect of an organization’s operations. With regulatory environments becoming increasingly complex and the rise of cloud-native and ephemeral systems, RegScale is committed to evolving its Continuous Controls Monitoring (CCM) platform to meet these emerging challenges. RegScale plans to enhance its AI-driven automation capabilities and compliance-as-code features, further reducing the time, cost, and effort involved in achieving certifications.
Pricing:
- For information on RegScale’s solutions for the high tech, financial services, and Federal government sectors, please visit: https://regscale.com. We have options that range from completely free (our Community Edition for small businesses) to the Fortune 500 scale.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://regscale.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/regscale/
- Twitter: https://x.com/RegScale
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@regscale
