Exiger’s Enterprise Sales Evolution: From Government Contracts to Commercial Scale
Success in government contracts doesn’t automatically translate to enterprise sales. But in a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Exiger CEO Brandon Daniels revealed how his team turned their COVID-19 response work into a springboard for commercial growth.
The Government Catalyst
During COVID-19, Exiger’s platform became crucial for government procurement. As Brandon explains: “In the COVID-19 response effort, we got to unleash the full capability that we had built that assessed operational risk, that assessed financial health, that assessed your technical capability to actually deliver the supplies that the customer was procuring.”
The platform’s performance created immediate credibility: “Being a part of the Joint Acquisition Task Force, being a part of Operation Warp Speed, what it did was it set us apart from our competition.”
The Network Effect
This visibility sparked a network effect. Brandon details how the initial success spread: “Those cloud companies that were involved in the Joint Acquisition Task Force and the Operation Warp Speed Task Force, they were all immediately privy to how our technology worked and how it was differentiated. So they became customers.”
The expansion continued: “The medical device, Pharma, PPE companies all were getting our data, were a part of the procurement process that were effectively supporting. And so then they became customers, the defense contractors that received funding because we identified that there were programs that they had that were at risk in the supply chain, they became customers.”
From Crisis to Commercial Scale
The growth was dramatic. Brandon notes: “What we saw is the company ramp extremely quickly in supply chain and third party risk management. We went from 10 million of arr in 2019 in the third party and supply chain space to a place where in the next twelve months we’ll be at 100 million in arr.”
The key was demonstrating value in real-world situations: “That kind of explosive growth only happens when people see how your technology, how your capability can meet a need in real time, right? It’s a bit of a black swan moment, but it’s also then sustaining and continuing that kind of delivery that then leads to expanded or explosive growth.”
Expanding the Use Cases
Customer demand drove product evolution. Brandon shares an example: “About maybe two and a half years ago, actually, we had a customer say, ‘hey, so I love the operational risk, financial, health, ownership, control and influence and reputational risk scoring that you do. But I really want to carve out for just ESG risks.'”
Their response? “We basically went on a six month sprint with that customer building and Iterating with them.”
Building for Scale
To support this growth, they had to optimize their operations. Brandon explains: “We shrunk our pool of hosting companies, shrunk our pool of data providers, and actually spent more with each of them…We took our data vendors from 83 to 20, but bought more from the 20.”
This created exceptional unit economics: “Every net new dollar that Exiger adds in terms of software revenue equals 90 plus percent gross margin.”
The Future Vision
Looking ahead, Brandon sees an even bigger opportunity: “Our aspiration is to do good and to do well…we want to be the platform that returns that conversation to a question of just performance and price because that’s where they’re naturally skilled.”
The key lesson for founders? Government success can create powerful commercial opportunities – if you can demonstrate clear value in high-stakes situations and build the operational infrastructure to scale. It’s not about just winning contracts; it’s about using those contracts to showcase your technology’s full potential to a broader market.