During our partnership, we navigated a founder transition, strengthened executive leadership, and expanded into new verticals. Over three years, ProcessUnity became a category leader in the governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) industry and enterprise value grew ~6x.
ProcessUnity Case Study
ProcessUnity: Achieving Leadership in GRC Software
When Long Ridge invested in ProcessUnity in 2018, high-profile data breaches had raised third-party risk to the top of every board’s agenda. ProcessUnity helped enterprises take control of that risk — providing real-time visibility into vendor security practices, policies, and performance.
Long Ridge with ProcessUnity CEO Sean Cronin
The Team
Todd Stone
Todd Stone founded ProcessUnity in 2003 to help companies manage third-party risk. ProcessUnity’s platform enables enterprises to identify, assess, and monitor vendors at scale, replacing spreadsheets with automated workflows.
Sean Cronin
In 2014, the company brought GRC expert Sean Cronin in as Vice President and General Manager. Sean helped transform ProcessUnity from a custom solutions provider into a scalable SaaS platform.
Key Results
2018–2021 Partnership
~6x
Enterprise value growth
~3x
ARR growth
Profitability
Achieved
The Opportunity
We first met ProcessUnity in 2014 through a thematic sourcing initiative around third-party IT risk. At the time, the company had less than $2 million in revenue, which is below our typical investment threshold. However, our prior investment in Browz — a platform for managing vendor insurance compliance and other supply chain risks — gave us conviction to follow the company closely.
We reconnected with ProcessUnity in 2018 as the company prepared for a majority recapitalization. Our Browz experience gave us credibility with the management team and deep conviction in the market opportunity. We believed that:
- Vendor cybersecurity risk management was following the same adoption curve we had seen with vendor insurance compliance at Browz
- High-profile data breaches and increasing regulatory pressure were driving enterprises to seek purpose-built software for third-party risk management related to IT exposure
- ProcessUnity had the best product for the mid-market: quick to implement, highly configurable, and competitively priced
“As a new CEO, catching up with the Long Ridge team helped keep my sanity. I bounced many ideas off the team. In these calls, they empowered me to keep talking and usually by the end of the conversation, I had solved my own problem. They trusted in the DNA they saw in me to run the business.”
“I got a sense that Long Ridge wanted to get to know us—the whole us—and not just the business. It was more than the numbers. It was more than the business focus. It was the intangibles. For Long Ridge, it’s personal.”
The Outcome
We positioned ProcessUnity with likely acquirers well in advance of a formal process, introducing the company to private equity firms focused on GRC software a year before exit.
In September 2021, Marlin Equity Partners acquired a majority stake in ProcessUnity with Long Ridge rolling over a significant stake in the company.
ProcessUnity has continued to grow under Marlin’s ownership, acquiring CyberGRX in 2023 to create the only end-to-end integrated risk management and cyber risk data assessment platform in the market.
The case studies represent a subset of Long Ridge’s investments. A complete list of investments made by Long Ridge funds during the relevant periods is available here. Investments are speculative and involve significant risks. Investors risk the loss of their entire investment.