Certa Raises $35M to Bring AI to Third-Party Risk Management

A third-party management platform founded by a longtime McKinsey consultant closed a funding round to bring further automation to compliance and procurement tasks. San Francisco-based Certa plans to use the $35 million to invest in artificial intelligence that takes text-based policies around everything from ESG and legal to compliance and procurement and converts them into controlled workflows that integrate with third-party tools, said founder and CEO Jag Lamba. The Series B financing was led by Fin Capital and Vertex Ventures, and it comes 18 months after the Series A. "The more we invest in AI here, the more automated each of these applications becomes," Lamba told Information Security Media Group. "And that's the goal." Certa currently employs 171 people. It was founded in 2013 by Lamba, who previously spent nearly 12 years as a senior strategy consultant at McKinsey. Lamba said artificial intelligence can help create a more conversational experience for infrequent users who only log into Certa once or twice a year and would rather interface with a chatbot than learn how to operate the platform themselves.