Crisis as Catalyst: How Exiger Turned COVID-19 into a 10X Growth Opportunity

Crisis as Catalyst: How Exiger Turned COVID-19 into a 10X Growth Opportunity

Crisis moments often reveal what your technology is truly capable of. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Exiger CEO Brandon Daniels shared how his team discovered their platform’s full potential during COVID-19, transforming from a compliance tool into a mission-critical supply chain platform that would grow 10X in just three years.

The Pre-Crisis Reality

Before COVID-19, Exiger was primarily focused on compliance screening. As Brandon explains: “We had been using our technology to help federal agencies, financial institutions, and corporates essentially do either reputational or cyber due diligence on vendors.”

The Moment Everything Changed

When the pandemic hit, the government needed to rapidly assess thousands of vendors for critical medical supplies while preventing fraud. This created an opportunity to showcase their platform’s full capabilities: “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 stakes couldn’t have been higher. Brandon recalls: “If we would vet 1000 vendors, there would be some cases where you’d have 1015, 2030 companies that you would exclude from the bid because they were so clearly unable and unprepared to deliver.”

Turning Crisis Into Opportunity

The team quickly realized this wasn’t just about handling an emergency – it was about demonstrating their platform’s true value. Their technology uncovered critical supply chain vulnerabilities that no one else could see.

Brandon shares a pivotal example: “When we built out the ability to see the supply chains…what we saw was that the fact that everyone was trying to create the same ventilator actually created an inherent dependency in the supply chain where they were all trying to get one part, which is called a solenoid valve…that solenoid valve that was attached to that commodity ventilator was only made by one company in the world.”

Building on the Momentum

Success during COVID created a network effect within government agencies. “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,” Brandon explains.

But they didn’t stop there. When the 2022 downturn hit, instead of pulling back, they doubled down on efficiency and reinvestment. Brandon details their approach: “We took all of the benefits of these efficiency initiatives and stuck it into sales and marketing.”

The Results

The transformation was dramatic: “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.”

Key Lessons for Founders

1. Use Crisis to Showcase Full Capabilities: Don’t just solve the immediate problem – demonstrate your platform’s complete potential.
2. Look for Network Effects: Initial success in high-stakes situations can create rapid adoption across related organizations.
3. Double Down on What Works: When you find product-market fit in crisis, invest aggressively to maintain momentum.
4. Transform Your Cost Structure: Use periods of rapid growth to renegotiate and optimize your operational costs.

The crisis revealed something fundamental about Exiger’s mission. As Brandon puts it: “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.”

For founders, the lesson is clear: Sometimes the biggest opportunities come disguised as crises. The key is being prepared to demonstrate your full value when those moments arrive.