How Sprinto is building the world’s first autonomous compliance engine

Compliance becomes a major issue for companies looking to scale. It rarely shows up on roadmaps, yet it quietly consumes hours, headcount, and energy. Every new deal brings a fresh cycle of evidence collection, screenshots, access reviews, policy updates, risk logs, and vendor questionnaires. This work still lives in spreadsheets and overloaded email threads despite the rise of cloud tools.

“Most companies don’t fall short on compliance because they’re careless,” says Sprinto Co-founder Raghuveer Kancherla. “They fall short because the process is broken, repetitive, and far too manual.”

This recurring frustration, one they experienced deeply themselves, eventually became the trigger for Sprinto, which is Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC) automation platform that supports over 200 global security standards, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS.

Bengaluru-headquartered Sprinto was launched in 2020.

The backstory

Raghuveer Kancherla and Girish Redekar had been through this grind before. As co-founders of Recruiterbox, an HR tech platform they built at a time when SaaS wasn’t yet mainstream in India, they handled compliance in the most manual way possible, which is collecting evidence by hand, coordinating audits across time zones, and dealing with rising expectations around standards like GDPR.

Even with multiple tools, the work remained repetitive and fragmented. Every request from a customer or auditor meant going back to the same spreadsheets, logs, and systems.

“When we sold Recruiterbox, we knew exactly what we wanted to fix next,” Kancherla recalls. “Compliance shouldn’t interrupt work. It should run quietly in the background, like electricity. You only notice it when it stops working.”

Their partnership itself has roots much earlier. The duo were college classmates, joined the same first job, and even after moving to different companies.

Sprinto is a SaaS platform operating on a subscription model, with most customers on annual or multi-year plans. We offer three pricing tiers based on requirements: Starter, Professional, and Advanced.

The company works with both SMB and mid-market customers across SaaS, healthtech, and fintech. Sprinto currently serves around 3,000 customers in more than 75 countries. Sprinto’s clients include Whatfix, Bizongo, Happay, Turtlemint, and Rocketlane.

When GDPR became the turning point

The tipping moment arrived when GDPR came into force in for organisations in 2018. Kancherla found himself answering the same questions again and again: What data do you store? Who has access? How do you prove it?

The pattern was clear: the problem wasn’t unique to their startup. It was universal.

Companies needed a system that could integrate with internal tools, track controls automatically, and stay continuously audit-ready—not once a year, but every day. This realisation became the blueprint for Sprinto.

Also Read

Meet the startup that wants to shake up India’s soda aisle

From automation to autonomy

After years of studying GRC workflows across more than 3,000 companies, Sprinto’s founders noticed a shift. Organisations were no longer satisfied with partial automation. They wanted systems that could understand context, make decisions, and act with minimal oversight.

“Legacy GRC tools centralise data. They don’t drive action,” Kancherla often notes.

The compliance industry, he argues, is stuck in early levels: humans must steer every action, even as risks multiply.

Sprinto’s new AI architecture, built on an AI-ready data layer and agentic foundation, aims to push the industry toward advanced autonomy where the system can understand environments, adapt to changing risks, and execute updates proactively—while keeping humans firmly in charge.

Inside Sprinto’s AI Playground

One of Sprinto’s most notable experiments is AI Playground, a no-code workspace where compliance teams can build custom agents in minutes. Within weeks of launch, early adopters created over 100 agents, saving more than 5,000 hours of manual work, claims the founder.

Some of the early wins are telling. One customer automated almost its entire vendor due diligence workflow—document reviews, risk scoring, exception routing—doubling throughput without expanding the team.

Another set up an incident-to-risk workflow that auto-classifies new incidents and drafts risk entries instantly.

These once-fragmented processes now run autonomously, with humans approving only the final step. The internal mantra at Sprinto is simple: humans stay in command; AI handles the rest, states Kancherla.

A control review that used to take hours now takes minutes, with AI summarising evidence and flagging exceptions. Teams shift from chasing screenshots to validating and deciding—work that actually moves the business.

Solving the hardest problem in GRC

For Sprinto, mapping standards like SOC 2 or ISO 27001 was never the hardest part. The real challenge was building an AI that understands the relationships between risks, vendors, policies, systems, incidents, and access controls.

Kancherla explains that if a major internet service goes down, the AI must instantly understand which vendors rely on it, which employees access those vendors, and what risks or controls might be impacted. Building this “context engine” required a structured graph of every GRC entity—something traditional tools don’t offer.

This architecture is what powers Sprinto’s “Ask AI,” which the company says reaches 80%+ audit-grade accuracy. Critically, it follows one non-negotiable rule: if the AI is unsure, it must ask the user.

The system autonomously handles repetitive tasks, but judgment-heavy decisions remain with humans. Even Sprinto’s Fix It Agent—which can execute browser-level security fixes—stops and asks before making impactful changes.

The rise of shadow AI

Across customers like Whatfix, Bizongo, Happay, and Rocketlane, Sprinto has observed a fast-emerging risk category: Shadow AI.

Employees are increasingly feeding sensitive data into external AI tools—often without knowing the implications. This is pushing organisations toward real-time controls, where every AI interaction triggers a policy or confidence check.

“Sprinto believes autonomous, context-aware AI will be essential in managing this shift,” says Kancherla.

Because GRC data is deeply sensitive, Sprinto built its AI stack with strict safeguards. Customer data never trains models, Ask AI responds only within contextual boundaries, and all recommendations come with explanations. Every major action requires human approval, and the system is aligned with ISO 42001 principles.

“The goal is clear: make AI a compliance asset, not a new liability,” he adds.

Regulations change constantly, and keeping track is a challenge for any growing business.

Sprinto’s Infinite Frameworks engine continuously monitors new regulations, identifies what matters to each customer, and maps updates to existing controls—producing gap assessments in days instead of months.

“Humans still review the recommendations, but the heavy lifting of interpretation and mapping is handled by the system,” says Kancherla.

The road ahead

According to the latest research study, the global Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC) Platform Market size and share were valued at approximately $ 62.5 billion in 2024, are expected to reach $64.6 billion in 2025, and are projected to grow to around $151.5 billion by 2034, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 13.2% during the forecast period from 2025 to 2034.

For FY 2024–25, Sprinto recorded revenue of approximately Rs 100 crore.

Backed by a $20M Series B, Sprinto plans to deepen integrations across SaaS systems, expand AI-driven actions, and move closer to what it calls a “real-time compliance brain” for fast-scaling companies.

Over the next 12–18 months, the company expects to introduce deeper integrations, more context-aware agents, wider framework coverage, and an autonomy layer that brings continuous, always-on compliance closer to reality.

The founders believe the future of GRC is inevitable.

“Compliance won’t be an annual project anymore,” Kancherla says. “It will be something your system does—in real time.”