Approva a provider of continuous controls monitoring (CCM) software, was founded in 2002 in the wake of the collapse of Enron and Worldcom. Approva’s founder, Prashanth PV” Boccasam recognized that the security controls built into ERP and financial systems were inadequate to address new and forthcoming regulatory requirements and he figured out how to develop and implement automated business controls that could prevent future scandals.

Today Approva’s products are used by hundreds of the world’s largest corporations and government agencies to identify, monitor and prevent business exceptions that result in inappropriate payments, fraud, and compliance risk. By automatically flagging risks and accounting errors as they occur, companies can reduce cash leaks, lower compliance costs and reduce the cost of tracking down and resolving errors that impact financial statements. Approva’s marketing slogan, “I Love a Good Audit,” captures one of the company’s key customer benefits; since exceptions are addressed as they occur, those quarterly visits from the auditor go a lot more smoothly.

“We have seen tremendous growth in the continuous controls monitoring (CCM) market,” said Approva Chief Executive Officer, John Becker. “With organizations looking to squeeze every penny in unnecessary cost and inefficiency out of their operations, CCM applications offer an attractive return on investment since they can fund themselves based on the inefficiency and waste they uncover.”

By building their applications on a single CCM platform, the Approva BizRights Platform, the company can analyze and correlates control information not only across the spaghetti soup of financial systems that comprise most companies’ IT environments but also across different processes. So, for example, a company can use Approva’s solution to monitor travel and entertainment expenses, purchase orders and entries to the general ledger. This platform-based approach also enables Approva to quickly respond to customer requirements and competitive threats. It is one of the major reasons why many of the largest audit and advisory firms – including the “Big 4” – have licensed Approva to perform client audits.

The company recently secured $14 million in new investment from Columbia Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Novak Biddle, Sierra Ventures and Gold Hill Capital. It plans to use the new investment to accelerate product development and expand sales and marketing.

The company’s long-term vision is to enable organizations worldwide to make audit and compliance of business controls a non-issue to the point where compliance is taken for granted and companies can have confidence in the integrity of their business systems, processes and transactions and focus 100% of their effort on their customers.