SafeBase is a company that empowers organizations to develop a customer-facing scalable Trust Center that automates the security review process between buyers and sellers. Pulse 2.0 interviewed SafeBase co-founder and CEO Al Yang to learn more about the company.
Al Yang’s Background
(Adar Arnon and Al Yang – SafeBase co-founders)
What is Al Yang’s background? Yang said:
“My entrepreneurial journey began with two successful ventures prior to SafeBase, both culminating in acquisitions. I also have a background in Tech M&A investment banking on Wall Street, which gave me a unique perspective on the opportunities within the security landscape.”
Formation Of SafeBase
How did the idea for SafeBase come together? Yang shared:
“At the last company that I built, we sold software to hospitals and they were always asking about our security posture and how we were protecting patient data. While we invested heavily in security and compliance, it was very difficult to showcase everything they needed, and it became a very expensive problem. When Adar Arnon (co-founder) and I met at Harvard’s MS/MBA program, we knew there was an opportunity to solve this. Eventually, we entered the Y Combinator startup accelerator program, which gave us the tools and guidance to build our idea into the company you see today.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Yang explained:
“The SafeBase Trust Center Platform automates the security review process and transforms how companies communicate their security and trust posture. Our flagship Trust Center and AI-powered Questionnaire Assistance products empower security, GRC, and revenue teams to significantly reduce the need for time-consuming security questionnaires.”
“The SafeBase Trust Center Platform establishes a buyer-facing home for a company’s security documentation, greatly simplifying the review process for buyers and sellers alike and making it easy to highlight and promote their security posture. Designed to adapt to and augment how organizations already do business, our Trust Center meets both buyers and vendors where they are, making their jobs easier and lives simpler no matter the tools they’re using.”
“SafeBase provides a central hub for businesses to demonstrate their security posture, manage security-related documents, and communicate updates with buyers and customers. With transparency at its core, the SafeBase Trust Center Platform delivers a centralized and automated approach to trust management that helps build a stronger digital ecosystem. Some of the most-reviewed companies in the world, such as Abnormal Security, Asana, Axonius, GitLab, Jamf, LinkedIn, and OpenAI, use SafeBase Trust Centers to build and maintain customer trust.”
“SafeBase’s AI Questionnaire Assistance is designed to save teams time on security reviews by using security data-trained AI to answer security questionnaires with accurate and reliable responses that cut down questionnaire review times by over 80%. Teams can auto-approve high-confidence answers and collaborate on edits to AI-generated responses to ensure the most insightful and accurate answers to questionnaires.”
“SafeBase also offers a variety of integrations and extensions meant to streamline security reviews. We recently released enhancements to our Salesforce integration, allowing companies to seamlessly plug their Trust Center directly into Salesforce to enable sales and CS teams to view buyer and customer activity, including Trust Center access requests, NDA completions, and document downloads. With SafeBase’s Google Chrome extension, companies can use AI Questionnaire Assistance to respond to outstanding security questionnaires in a fraction of the time with minimal manual effort and a high degree of accuracy, eliminating the tedious and time-consuming back-and-forth questionnaire response process by allowing security teams to provide questionnaire responses directly within a buyer’s risk management portal.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Yang cited:
“We raised our Series A funding round in March 2022, which expedited our go-to-market strategy. In 2023, SafeBase saw exponential revenue growth and now serves over 800 customers with 98% gross retention. SafeBase expanded its offerings in 2023 as well with the acquisition of Stacksi, an AI security questionnaire automation platform. Last year, we were also selected as an RSA Conference Innovation Sandbox finalist, named to Fortune’s Cyber60 in 2023 and 2024, and saw more than two million views of our flagship Trust Center product. More recently, we completed our Series B funding round and released new product enhancements, including Salesforce, Slack, and Teams integrations plus a Chrome extension.”
Customer Success Stories
When asking Yang about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“Jamf, a leading provider of Apple mobile device management (MDM) solutions, came to us while experiencing unprecedented growth. Their customer pipeline was exploding, and the sales team was scaling quickly to keep up with demand. As a result, the company’s security team struggled to respond to the ever-increasing customer questionnaires and one-off requests, leading to mutual frustration as sales cycles lagged. Meanwhile, the mounting backlog of sales-initiated requests took security team members away from higher-ROI initiatives.”
“Jamf’s security team needed a comprehensive customer trust solution that would reduce the manual demands of responding to customer questionnaires, enabling customers to quickly and easily access security documentation and diligence materials. At the same time, the solution needed to enable strict controls on access to the information and provide clear visibility into the Security team’s impact on revenue.”
“We were able to work quickly and implement our solution company-wide within 90 days to help support their urgent business needs. Overall, we saved Jamf more than 4,000 hours of work, replaced $20,000+ of spend on other software tools, and $10+ million revenue lifted annually by the security team with time saved with SafeBase.”
Funding
When asking Yang about the company’s funding details, he revealed:
“In 2022, SafeBase raised a $18 million Series A funding round, accelerating its work to enhance trust between vendors and buyers. In Spring 2024, we closed a $33 million Series B funding round, bringing the company’s total funding to over $50 million and giving SafeBase more opportunity to transform the future of transparency in security reviews.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Yang assessed:
“Our current customer focus is US-based SaaS companies who are scaling rapidly and need their security programs to grow with their business. While we serve customers of all sizes, the majority of our customers are mid-market and enterprise.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Yang affirmed:
“SafeBase stands apart from other trust center platforms for several key reasons. At the core of our approach is trust. Trust begins with transparency, which is why we built our comprehensive Trust Center Platform to make the security review process more transparent and instill trust between vendors and buyers. Security reviews have become a broken, inconsistent process, and by making trust and transparency central, we help businesses accurately communicate their security and trust posture to prospective customers.”
“What truly separates SafeBase is our focus on enterprise-grade features and reducing friction in the security review process. The SafeBase Trust Center Platform is a centralized hub that integrates seamlessly with businesses’ existing security and business tools, bringing together the fragmented network of software our customers use. Our flagship Trust Center and AI Questionnaire Assistance products empower security, GRC, and revenue teams to significantly reduce the need for time-consuming security questionnaires, deliver better buying experiences, accelerate sales velocity, and position security as a business driver. In addition, our enterprise-grade trust center application connects to sales and security stacks, providing robust and scalable solutions for today’s leading organizations.”
“No other company offers a comprehensive Trust Center Platform like SafeBase does; it stands alone as the complete trust posture digital ecosystem of choice for many of the most well-known brands in technology, including Amplitude, ClickUp, Datadog, Gigamon, Plaid, Postman, and Ramp.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Yang pointed out:
“Similar to how business professionals have a LinkedIn profile showcasing their work history, our goal is for every company to have a Trust Center to showcase their security stance. Right now, we’re working to build our partner network so our customers can better connect their SafeBase Trust Center to the other security software tools they use daily.”
Additional Thoughts
Any other topics you would like to discuss? Yang concluded:
“Software supply chain hacks have grown in frequency, with 91% of companies reporting some kind of software supply chain incident in the last year. This is extremely challenging for all businesses because it emphasizes the importance of properly vetting vendors and having a transparent process in place to review and verify vendor trust and security posture. We’re working to solve this issue of security through obscurity by making it easier for buyers to understand prospective vendors’ security and trust posture and mend the broken security reviews process.”
