Matt Kunkel is Co-Founder and CEO of LogicGate, a Chicago-based SaaS company that provides GRC process automation, enabling organizations to operationalize their governance, risk, and compliance programs for enhanced clarity, control, and accountability.

LogicGate is doubling down on product innovation, enhancing current capabilities, expanding AI features, and developing predictive solutions to mitigate future risk.

Prior to LogicGate, he spent over a decade in the management consulting space building technology solutions to operationalize regulatory, risk, and compliance programs for Fortune 100 companies. It was during this time he learned the skills to realize his true calling: building world-class companies that meaningfully affect the lives of others through user-friendly technology. Matt is recognized as a thought leader in the governance, risk, and compliance space and regularly speaks and consults on risk and compliance topics.

What inspired you and your co-founders to start LogicGate, and how have the company’s operations evolved over the past decade?

LogicGate was born from the headaches of my decade-long management consulting career, where myself, Jon Siegler and Dan Campbell spent a lot of time building technology solutions that optimized regulatory, risk, and compliance programs for Fortune 100 companies. During that time, we labored over bespoke systems that were effective, but extremely difficult and time-consuming to use and maintain.

If I had to guess, about 90% of the work I was doing was identical across clients, yet was being delivered separately every time. This realization sparked the idea for a SaaS GRC platform that not only provides a holistic view of enterprise-wide risk but is also designed for flexibility, scalability, and easy deployment.

As consultants, we knew the complexity of the GRC landscape, so we jumped on the opportunity to disrupt the market with the Risk Cloud platform. We started with a flexible, no-code platform that gave our customers the power to manage, build, and scale their own programs — but now, we are so much more. Today, LogicGate stands as a market leader in modern, enterprise-grade GRC solutions.

Our customers benefit from automated workflows and real-time monitoring, seamless integrations, and AI-driven analytics that provide actionable insights and empower their teams to be more efficient and effective. Instead of just checking compliance boxes, we’re helping businesses harness the full power of AI-driven GRC to foster sustainable growth, enhance operational efficiency, and build organizational resilience. We’re also helping GRC professionals quantify the impact of their risk management activities, allowing them to speak the language of businesses and align with key decision makers throughout the organization.

LogicGate has grown rapidly in recent years without outside acquisitions or even a formal pitch deck. What’s driven that organic growth?

When considering growth options for your company, it’s tempting to compare yourself to other organizations. However, LogicGate has always been laser-focused on internal happenings — how can we learn more, improve our solution, and stay ahead? That’s worked greatly in our favor. With our attention focused squarely on improving our own platform and enhancing customer ROI, we’ve been able to take user feedback and turn it into actionable innovation, delivering new features that directly address their pain points and equip them with the tools they need to thrive today and scale as they grow and mature their GRC programs.

With this evolution came natural growth; our client base began to grow across all industries — especially heavily regulated spaces such as financial services, insurance, and healthcare. We let our innovations speak for themselves, and they did. Large enterprise clients have realized the power of a modern, centralized GRC solution that offers holistic, enterprise-wide visibility, real-time reporting, and robust API integrations — momentum that has been a key driver of LogicGate’s revenue growth and strong client retention.

What makes LogicGate stand out from competitors in a crowded GRC market, especially as AI becomes a bigger factor?

There’s no way around it: if you want to be competitive in any business landscape, you must adopt AI-powered solutions but it’s essential to have robust AI governance strategies in place to minimize risk. LogicGate is already reshaping how organizations approach AI governance, namely through tight integrations with all core GRC models: policy and procedure, cyber risk, controls compliance, and third-party risk. While other solutions may only focus on isolated aspects of AI compliance, LogicGate ensures AI governance solutions are deeply embedded into our platform’s foundation. Customers have the autonomy to define how, when, and where AI is used, and that customer-driven evolution is another force that drives our growth every day.

Additionally, Risk Cloud doesn’t just help organizations govern AI, the platform is also powered by AI. Our suite of Spark AI features empowers customers to make confident, risk-based decisions. Furthermore, the opt-in AI features are designed to make our customers more efficient and effective, whether that’s through text editing, intuitive record linking recommendations, automated controls mapping, and more. With these offerings, we’re driving modern-day GRC practices – predictive, proactive, and dynamic.

But it’s not just our technology that sets us apart in the crowded GRC market; it’s also our incredible people. We built a team that deeply understands the nuances of GRC and is committed to helping our customers lead in this new era of AI. Their insight, integrity, and relentless focus on outcomes ensure that LogicGate isn’t just keeping up with change – we’re helping to define it.

You speak about modernization. What makes the Risk Cloud platform modern versus a “legacy” or point-solution system?

Complacency is the enemy of innovation. Legacy systems are inflexible, manual, reactive, siloed, and clunky — the antithesis of what a modern-day GRC solution should look like. And, at this point, if you’re not modernizing your business and embracing the power of AI, you’re already falling behind.

We created Risk Cloud to be just that: a modern solution born in the cloud, empowering risk leaders to upgrade from outdated legacy systems in the GRC industry. If static, manual, and cumbersome solutions are hindering business growth, the logical response is to create a dynamic, scalable alternative that businesses can adjust to meet their specific needs without breaking the bank on expensive and difficult-to-use custom solutions.

LogicGate was built with the future in mind, helping companies build programs that evolve with the business — always staying modern and adaptive as the company scales. Risk Cloud is a cloud-native, no-code, and multi-tenant platform with embedded AI, auto workflows, and pre-built connectors. The UI is modern and user-friendly, and every day, our incredible team of engineers, TAMS, client service professionals, and more works together to build, test, and roll out new features that meet our customers’ needs not just today, but tomorrow as well.

The majority of your growth has come from enterprise-sized companies. How do SMB and enterprise needs differ, and why is LogicGate poised to support those large enterprise demands?

The needs of SMBs and enterprises differ in terms of scale, complexity, and regulatory burden. On one hand, SMBs typically seek out faster time-to-value with pre-built solutions that can be deployed quickly and require less customization. Can Risk Cloud do that? Absolutely.

On the other hand, enterprises demand a much higher level of flexibility, integration, and governance capabilities. With high configurability and a no-code architecture, Risk Cloud is uniquely suited to empower risk and compliance teams to design complex workflows without a heavy reliance on IT. On top of that, we’ve invested in intuitive AI features, scalability, auditability, and enterprise-grade security, offering transformative advantages that extend beyond risk and compliance into delivering significant strategic value. For large, enterprise-sized organizations, having a holistic view of company-wide risk is invaluable. They can’t afford to take a lackadaisical approach to risk; the consequences – financial and reputational – are too steep.

Could you tell us more about recent innovations like Spark AI and your investments in automation? How are those elements transforming risk and compliance management?

All of LogicGate’s most recent innovations — including Spark AI and the Value Realization Tool — advance our mission to simplify GRC and help businesses make risk-based decisions that boost the bottom line.

Spark AI, which expanded last year, streamlines risk assessments, automates workflows, and accelerates resolution across core GRC functions. It empowers employees to operate faster, reduce manual overhead, and focus on higher-value tasks. Key features include AI Text Connect (which intelligently drafts risk and compliance materials), AI Controls Mapping (which eliminates manual gap analyses), and recommendations linking (which uses Spark AI technology to suggest and connect related GRC records like risks, controls, policies, incidents, and frameworks). These tools, and others, help organizations meet today’s demands for efficiency.

The first-to-market Value Realization Tool gives customers real-time visibility into the financial impact of their GRC programs The tool automatically tracks metrics such as resource efficiency, revenue enablement, and risk reduction, presenting them all in a streamlined dashboard that connects risk management actions with tangible business benefits. With this crucial insight, GRC teams can benchmark performance, align with strategic objectives, and secure executive buy-in by demonstrating financial business benefits, bridging the gap between risk teams and board-level executives.

Overall, these new features and many others enhance productivity while also transforming GRC into a quantifiable business asset. Together, they’re helping LogicGate users shift from reactive compliance to dynamic, data-driven risk management.

You’ve mentioned that agentic AI will play a major role in automating GRC. What does the future of AI-powered governance look like, and where is human involvement still critical?

When we think about agentic AI, we’re talking about technology that does more than assist. Instead, it proactively recommends, adjusts, and executes routine governance tasks with minimal friction — helping to link controls to risks automatically, assess impact scenarios in real time, and even flag regulatory threats before they become critical. The potential is sky-high – but right now, businesses still need to keep a “human in the loop.” Agentic AI can enhance and elevate human judgment and decision-making, but relying on the technology for total automation would be a mistake.

Risk and compliance will always need professionals who can interpret context, navigate ambiguity, and weigh ethical considerations, especially as this technology stumbles through its earliest stages. AI can (and should) streamline time-consuming, manual tasks, but anything that requires deep expertise needs human oversight. Though AI could automate many steps in the GRC process, we have to ask ourselves, “Should it?” Ultimately, AI will transform governance by amplifying human capability, not replacing it.

What major trends are reshaping the GRC industry right now, and where do you see the biggest opportunities for innovation?

If I had to describe the current GRC industry in one word, it would be intelligence. The industry isn’t just chasing efficiency for its own sake; instead, it is leveraging AI to work smarter, faster, and with deeper insight. That means not just aggregating data but identifying and understanding the right data to drive better, more informed decisions. AI-powered agents and embedded copilots are transforming how we operate: mapping data to controls, updating risk scores, auto-filling forms, recommending remediations, triggering pre-built workflows without human intervention, and more. These intelligent capabilities are reshaping how we think about proactive risk management and strategic decision-making.

As the risk landscape continues to evolve, new frameworks are always emerging, and traditional ones are changing. Organizations need to deploy GRC solutions that are just as dynamic, moving closer to real-time risk management that delivers live telemetry, alerts you when thresholds are nearly met, and automates workflows in response. That is how GRC professionals need to think about risk management, not just for today, but for the next decade: shifting from static, manual pillars to smart, predictive systems that scale across the enterprise.

Looking ahead, what are LogicGate’s biggest priorities for the next few years, and what advice would you give to business leaders trying to scale their company?

LogicGate is doubling down on product innovation, enhancing current capabilities, expanding AI features, and developing predictive solutions to mitigate future risk. We’re entering a transformative era in GRC, and our priorities (especially around AI) reflect that. LogicGate is looking at AI as not just a co-pilot, but an increasingly autonomous agent that can help customers limit surprises and do so with confidence.

As for advice, scaling efficiently is a combination of two things: good people and risk-based bets. First, find the people who are smarter than you, hire them, and then trust them to do their jobs. If you build a culture where accountability and autonomy thrive, you’re golden. The second aspect here is a harder pill to swallow, but if you want to grow, you can’t be afraid of risk. Scaling isn’t about playing it safe; it’s about having the wherewithal to take calculated, risk-based bets. In short: Be bold in the right ways, and make sure you have the right people beside you.

What inspired you to make Chicago LogicGate’s home, and how has the city shaped your journey so far?

Chicago has always been home for me, and because it offered the perfect blend of talent, community, and grit, choosing it as LogicGate’s headquarters was a no-brainer. The strong pool of tech and business professionals creates an infectious energy, and beyond that, Chicago’s supportive business community and focus on innovation have created an environment where companies like ours can thrive. The city’s growing reputation as a hub for enterprise SaaS also meant we were in the right place to connect with clients. Overall, the city has provided the perfect foundation we needed for turning our vision into reality, which is one of the many reasons we’re standing so strong today. Also, Go Cubs!

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