The Story of Exiger: Building the Future of Supply Chain Risk Management

The Story of Exiger: Building the Future of Supply Chain Risk Management

Great companies often start with solving one problem, only to discover a much bigger opportunity along the way. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Exiger CEO Brandon Daniels shared how a background in legal technology led to building one of the largest supply chain risk management platforms in the market.

From Legal Tech to Risk Management

Brandon’s journey into risk management wasn’t planned. “I kind of ended up in risk management through customers,” he explains. While at LexisNexis, a major client, Medtronic, needed help running investigations. “I was on the legal side of the LexisNexis business. They needed us to deploy our software, and then they needed someone to help them really implement it and accelerate the parts of the case that our software could.”

This experience sparked a realization about combining technology with risk management: “I got put in place as a consultant. Ended up really deep in the investigation in that one matter, and that really turned me into someone that loved combining risk management and investigatory skills with technology. And that’s been my career ever since.”

The COVID-19 Catalyst

Before COVID-19, Exiger was focused primarily on compliance. As Brandon notes, “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 pandemic changed everything. Suddenly, their technology was being tested in life-or-death situations. The government needed to rapidly assess thousands of vendors for critical medical supplies while preventing fraud. This high-stakes environment revealed the platform’s true potential.

Brandon recalls one critical insight: When analyzing ventilator production plans, they discovered that multiple manufacturers were unknowingly dependent on a single component supplier in Italy. This kind of hidden supply chain vulnerability became a crucial focus: “We need to pierce the veil not only on who we’re buying from, but who they’re buying from and who they’re buying from so that we can see the problems that potentially sit at the bottom of the supply base.”

Building Through Crisis

The COVID response effort transformed Exiger’s approach to product development. Their platform began identifying not just compliance issues, but critical operational risks. “We got to use the full breadth of the platform that we had built in real time in a real sort of battle or mission focused scenario,” Brandon explains.

The results were significant: “In the COVID-19 frontlines, it was incredible to see how often were actually finding companies that were not appropriate to buy from, either because they didn’t have the technical capability or they were reputationally problematic, or because they were literally just fraudulent.”

The Path to Scale

Success during COVID led to rapid expansion. Brandon shares the growth trajectory: “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.”

This growth wasn’t just about winning more customers – it was about fundamentally transforming how organizations approach risk. The platform evolved to handle everything from cyber security assessments to supply chain vulnerability analysis.

The Future Vision

Looking ahead, Brandon sees an even bigger opportunity: “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.”

The goal is to make risk management so seamless that procurement and operations teams can focus on their core competencies: “We want to be the platform that is helping our customers to not think about risk…procurement people, compliance people, operations people have so much that they have to consider when making business relationship decisions that we want to be the platform that returns that conversation to a question of just performance and price.”

It’s a vision of making the world safer and more transparent for business, one supply chain at a time.