In what officials are calling "a redirecting of the company," Lumigent Technologies Inc., founded in 2000, is getting a fresh start this year, announcing last month that it has secured $6 million in Series A funding from North Bridge Venture Partners and entering the marketplace as if it were a brand new company.
And it should, as it has a brand new product, called Application Government, Risk, and Compliance, known as AppGRC, that moves the company beyond its database auditing tool roots and into a new world of business applications that automate compliance reporting in heavily regulated industries that include manufacturing.
The existing tools, including Lumigent's own Audit DB, require subject matter experts - in the form of consultants and even extra IT staff - who can implement a very manual-intensive compliance tracking process. The cost of such an approach, commonly referred to as a "compliance tax," typically runs $2 million to $4.5 million per year.
John Capobianco, who came on board as Lumigent's president and CEO last year, experienced the compliance tax firsthand a few years ago when he took a company public and watched his finance costs soar from $300,000 per year to $2.5 million by having to hire several more internal people and six outside consultants.