Ansarada: Investing in a market leader

As the decentralisation of company operations and information accelerates, one of the most complex issues for companies to deal with is the secure management, storage and sharing of sensitive information, and more importantly to know who viewed that information.

This is a huge issue for management teams and boards, especially in a world where data and information is a key competitive advantage, and security risks are multi-dimensional. To make matters worse, incumbent tools and software providers have been slow to accept customer risks and slow to build flexible and intuitive software products that adequately manage, secure, and share highly sensitive information at a corporate level.

This is why we’re excited to announce our largest investment to date into Ansarada, an Australian SaaS company managing sensitive information for thousands of corporate customers globally, founded by Sam Riley, Rachel Riley and Andrew Slavin.

With tenacious focus and discipline, Ansarada has grown to more than 160 employees across offices in Sydney, London, New York and Chicago, off the back of only one previous round of external capital from investors, and retained one of the most envied corporate cultures in Australia.

Folklore has invested in Ansarada’s $24M Series A round, alongside Ellerston Capital and Australian Ethical Investments. This investment will accelerate the global growth in Ansarada’s core virtual data room product, and the establishment of the Material Information Platform — a highly secure product managing critical corporate information between internal and external stakeholders.

Ansarada was an early mover in highly secure virtual data rooms, cloud software that manages due diligence information whenever there is a material transaction, such as an investment, acquisition, tender or an audit. Ansarada’s core product allows data and information owners to manage, track, observe and control information distribution in conjunction with advisors and other external parties, and has grown to 70%+ market share in Australia and a sizeable presence globally.

In commercialising its world-class data room product across an exceptional customer base, Ansarada established that it could extend its product suite to manage information beyond event-driven activities, to steady-state operations where data and information are routinely shared.

Offering all the security, audit and collaboration features that have been built into Ansarada’s data rooms, the Material Information Platform (MIP) is a central repository which secures and manages highly sensitive and critical corporate information amongst internal and external stakeholders as a steady state business practice. The MIP allows companies to be in a constant state of readiness for corporate activity such as audits, investments, acquisitions, due diligence, crisis management and regulatory activity.

Recently Forbes Asia (article) summarised the multi-dimensional risks for boards and management relating to company data, whilst the MIT-Sloan Management Review has published a series of research papers on company risks in an ever-changing data environment. Whilst most people intuitively understand the importance of data security, the reality is that most companies have been slow to adapt to secure practices for sharing data. Management, Boards, and employees still rely on email, low-security file-sharing software and increasingly messaging products, to share critical information in a manner that leaves companies critically exposed.

Locally, the ASX and ASIC released a report in April 2017 labeling data security an issue of critical national importance, whilst simultaneously exposing that most companies only viewed their practices as ‘adequate’, with 45% of the companies acknowledging they had only a ‘reasonable’ or ‘limited’ understanding of the risks.

In a globally competitive environment, where time is of the essence and access to information is key, we believe the MIP and Ansarada’s approach to secure information management is a game-changing development.

Ansarada is solving a very big problem for businesses globally. They have built an amazing company culture, brand, and product and with this investment they are well placed to keep executing on their vision. We are thrilled to be going on the journey with the team.

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