Indo-U.S. firm looks to be “Google of compliance”

Narayanan Madhavan

BANGALORE: MetricStream Inc., an Indian-U.S. start-up, is doubling revenue every year selling software that attempts to automate regulatory compliance, its chairman said on Tuesday.

Accounting scandals, food and drug giants hit by consumer litigation and the complexity of driving increasingly global businesses has made automation of compliance key for both regulators and corporations.

MetricStream aims for a piece of the estimated $250 billion spent on compliance technology in the United States every year.

"We want to be the Google for compliance," the India-born, U.S.-based Chairman Gunjan Sinha said in an interview, referring to the world's top Internet search engine.

"We've created the entire topology for it," he said.

The firm has 110 staff, 70 in India, and about $100 million in venture capital, with investors including network gear maker Cisco, business software maker Oracle and Research In Motion, maker of Blackberry email devices.

MetricStream sells patented software that links corporate computers to regulatory Web sites and constantly updates them, tying the process to e-mail to help managers control decisions.

Sinha said revenue, now in "tens of millions" of dollars, was expected to double every year for the next four or five years.

The spate of bad news hitting U.S. companies means big business. Executives seeking to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act can build internal controls around the software while developers can build customised applications on licence.

Sinha cited accounting scandals involving energy firm Enron and telecoms giant WorldCom and a $253 million jury award last week against Merck to the widow of a man who took its Vioxx drug as instances that would drive the compliance industry.

"In two or three years, the company should be in a critical mass of players of size and dominance," he said.

Sinha, who studied at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, co-founded the company, which is nurtured by a fellow alumnus, Vinod Khosla, a partner in influential Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers.

MetricStream customers include drug maker Pfizer, British Petroleum and restaurant chain Subway. "One bad batch of chicken can affect the Subway brand," Sinha said.

MetricStream has partners to service or build software based on the platform, including Computer Sciences Corp and Tata Consultancy Services.