The Idea: Every startup founder knows the feeling. You're close to closing an enterprise deal when the procurement team drops the SOC 2 requirement on you. Suddenly you're buried in spreadsheets, screenshots, Slack threads, and late nights - all before you've written a single line of product code. Lewis Carhart knew this pain better than most, having watched entire quarters disappear into compliance black holes at his previous companies. So in late 2024, he teamed up with Mariano Fuentes and Claudio Fuentes - fellow Silicon Valley founders who'd lived the same nightmare - to build the solution they'd always wanted: an open source, AI-first alternative to the expensive, clunky incumbents. The mission was simple but audacious - help 100,000 companies achieve compliance by 2032 without the $25K+ price tag. This was the beginning of Comp AI.
The Execution:
The lesson? The best startups are built by founders who've bled the problem themselves. Carhart and his team didn't read about compliance pain in a Gartner report - they lived it. And by going open source from day one, they built trust with the exact community they were selling to. In a market dominated by expensive, locked-in incumbents, sometimes the most radical thing you can do is just make it free to start.