The Story of Trustero: Building the Future of AI-Powered Compliance

Sometimes the best business ideas come from solving your own problems. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Phillip Liu shared how his experience with compliance challenges at Trustero sparked the creation of Trustero, a company reimagining how businesses handle compliance through AI.

From Infrastructure Monitoring to Compliance Innovation

After selling Trustero to Splunk for over a billion dollars, Phillip didn’t take the typical post-exit break. Instead, a persistent challenge from his SignalFX days kept nagging at him. “While at SignalFX, obviously there are a lot of ideas I had about how to expand the business. One of them was actually to deal with compliance,” Phillip explains. The connection might seem unexpected, but it made perfect sense to him: “What does infrastructure monitoring have to do with compliance? At the time that went through the process of getting signal effects to be compliant with SoC two, a lot of that process was very analogous to monitoring.”

This insight led to a compelling vision: what if you could apply the same data analytics and monitoring principles to business processes that Trustero had applied to infrastructure? As Phillip notes, “Instead of monitoring just the physical, virtual infrastructure of an application, you also have to monitor the ongoing business of processes.”

The AI Revolution in Compliance

Trustero’s journey took a significant turn with the rise of large language models. Having worked with data science at Trustero, Phillip recognized the potential of AI to transform compliance. “One of the reasons why we started out Trustero was we dealt with data science at SealFX, and I kind of thought the next motion is really more around using large language models and machine learning to solve problem rather than statistical know.”

This bet on AI paid off dramatically in 2023. “This year we finally reached a point where sort of the confluence of large language models being released and all the noise that’s going around with it. And we actually reached a point where our technology and the use of LMS basically help us solve and sort of replace not only tasks, but almost complete roles of what a compliance professional will have to do.”

Transforming Compliance Work

Trustero’s impact on compliance workflows is substantial. The platform automates several critical functions that traditionally required significant manual effort. As Phillip explains, “We’ve basically taken away two functionalities that a compliance professional have to deal with, and they’re reducing their times.” This includes automating the review of compliance reports and conducting internal audits.

The results have been remarkable. Since launching their AI capabilities, Phillip notes they’ve seen “probably 50 to 70 times mql growth.” This growth validates their approach to using AI not just as a feature, but as a fundamental way to reimagine compliance processes.

The Future of Business Trust

Looking ahead, Phillip envisions a fundamental transformation in how businesses establish and maintain trust. “We now live in a world where all the businesses are somewhat interconnected, and we all want to understand and be able to trust, from a securities perspective, how other businesses operate.”

His vision extends beyond traditional compliance frameworks to a more dynamic, automated future. “In time, I think what will happen is that this notion of having to be compliant with a particular standard, a specific standard will probably give way to transparency and then transparency that’s vetted by automation.”

This transformation could revolutionize how businesses interact and trust each other, creating what Phillip describes as “logically, a trust graph of not only how you operate procedurally internal within your company, but the connection between companies, what company uses, what tools, and therefore what risks they may pose to a buyer of that company product.”

For B2B founders watching this space, Trustero’s story demonstrates how solving a personal pain point, combined with strategic timing and technological innovation, can create category-defining companies. As businesses become increasingly interconnected, the need for automated, intelligent compliance solutions will only grow.