The Story of Hyperproof: Building the Future of Enterprise Trust

Sometimes the most transformative business ideas emerge from moments of crisis. For Craig Unger, that moment came in the midst of managing Microsoft’s authentication systems, facing down an FTC audit that could have resulted in catastrophic fines of “a million dollars user a day” across “100 million unique users a month.”

In a recent Category Visionaries episode, Craig shared how this nerve-wracking experience sparked the idea for Hyperproof. The stakes were enormous, but the tools were primitive: “I had to do these really very deep audits, very little tooling help or infrastructure and of course I was really just a product person at that time. I didn’t know anything about compliance and so it was a very scary time for me because one error could really be very impactful to the company.”

From Crisis to Innovation That experience stuck with Craig long after the audit. When he launched his first startup, he encountered similar challenges on a smaller scale. “We had GE the IMF as customers and they wanted us to do more compliance as well. And still was doing it out of spreadsheets and sticking files up on file shares and lots of email.” The pattern was clear: “Every workload at some point when it becomes important, serious and very high value will evolve out of a spreadsheet.”

This realization, combined with broader market shifts, convinced Craig the timing was right for a new approach to compliance. “One of the reasons I actually started the company was the Facebook Cambridge analytics, that whole debacle that happened back in 2018. And I’m like, look, the more tech that comes out, the more threat there is to our personal information, security, et cetera. This is just going to spiral.”

Building a New Category Rather than simply building better tools for passing audits, Craig envisioned a fundamental shift in how organizations approach compliance. Hyperproof pioneered what they call “compliance operations,” focusing on continuous compliance rather than point-in-time audits.

The approach is gaining traction. Hyperproof has been “growing at least two x a year for a number of years” with “hundreds of customers, dozens of partners, great kind of CSAT folks.” About “75, 80% of the time” they sell into the CISO’s office, reflecting how technical compliance has largely migrated from legal departments to security teams.

A Vision for the Future Looking ahead, Craig sees Hyperproof playing a crucial role in transforming how organizations build and maintain trust. “The compliance and security world hasn’t really adjusted to that. In other words, they’re still laboring under the belief that in order to do well in the market, everybody that they serve needs to be convinced that they’re perfect and they don’t make mistakes.”

Instead, Craig envisions a future where organizations can “build trust in those situations where it’s kind of most tense because a mistake might have been made.” This vision extends beyond just compliance into broader questions of organizational trust and transparency.

The company’s tagline—”bringing trust to life”—reflects this ambitious mission. As Craig explains, “that’s the vessel that we look at, all of our innovation, it’s not just compliance or risk, but it’s bringing trust to life.” This includes expanding into additional areas like “risk, third party risk management” and “different kinds of reporting that we want to build and really just other pieces that help organizations be more transparent about the trust that they have.”

For Craig, the opportunity is clear: “The number of compliance frameworks and regulatory agencies that are kind of issuing guidance has grown much faster than I would have expected when I started the company.” As organizations grapple with increasing regulatory complexity and stakeholder demands for transparency, Hyperproof aims to be at the forefront of helping them navigate these challenges while building genuine trust with their stakeholders.

What started as a response to a personal crisis has evolved into a vision for transforming how organizations approach trust and compliance. For B2B founders, it’s a reminder that sometimes the biggest opportunities come not from building incrementally better tools, but from fundamentally reimagining how critical business challenges should be solved.