Compliance, data, and cybersecurity technology provider Surge Ventures has made its third acquisition, adding the compliance firm MGL Consulting as a wholly owned subsidiary this week.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
MGL joins Security Snapshot and Kovair, which Surge acquired in April 2024 as part of the venture studio, which remains focused on compliance, cybersecurity and data.
MGL was launched 41 years ago by Melinda “Mimi” G. LeGaye.
She will continue to lead MGL as CEO and take on the duties of president of compliance services within SurgeONE.ai, the AI platform rolled out by Surge just three weeks ago.
The technology and expertise of the three companies have been or are being (in the case of MGL) added to the AI platform on an ongoing basis.
“We are the only firm that combines cyber, compliance and data,” said Sid Yenamandra, CEO of SurgeONE.ai and the founder of Surge Ventures.
“On a combined basis, we are working with over 200 clients,” he said, which includes many RIAs of varying sizes and several IBDs. Some of those clients are new, while others were brought in through the acquisitions.
“Bringing MGL onboard is going to help us train some of the workflows and AI we have,” said Yenamandra.
“If you’ve done compliance reviews for years and built compliance policies for years, the depth of knowledge available for training that platform is invaluable,” said LeGaye. She added that this goes for many different capabilities, from automating audit to FINRA filing processes.
“You really want to look for patterns, practices and trends in the data,” she said. The more data available, the more types of risk assessments and risk reviews that can be automated.
In a nutshell, Security Snapshot provides advisory shops with real-time cybersecurity monitoring; Kovair provides data migration, management and workflow automation (among other features); and MGL (and its team of 14 professionals) will lend both technology and expertise to Surge’s existing compliance offerings. (That includes RegVerse, a company that was incubated from within the studio and officially launched in October 2023.)
Once complete, SurgeONE.ai is meant to be an end-to-end set of products that combines all three categories with access to human expertise.
“We saw a huge opportunity to rebuild the compliance tech stack,” said Yenamandra, “but one that is expert led, with compliance experts, cyber experts, data management experts—not just developers.”