Executive Summary

Many small software and cloud vendors—roughly 2 million potential upstream suppliers—are now being asked for SOC 2 reports to win or retain enterprise customers, yet the typical route to compliance remains time-consuming and expensive (audits alone often run into the tens of thousands, and manual evidence collection and policy drafting are major bottlenecks). That gap forces startups to either pay expensive consultants, stall deals, or produce low-quality documentation, creating an addressable market of about $6.0B assuming a $3,000 ACV for compliance tooling, prep, and verification services. You could build a SaaS platform that automates controls, continuously collects evidence via cloud and IdP APIs, uses LLMs to generate and map tailored policies to SOC 2 criteria, and produces auditor-ready evidence packages with an integrated attestation workflow. Price a baseline self-serve tier around the $3,000 ACV target and offer premium brokered attestations with partnered auditors; by automating log and IAM collection and policy drafts, you should be able to cut manual prep time by a large margin (we estimate up to ~70% in many cases). The timing is favorable because vendor trust requirements are expanding, cloud infrastructure is API-first, and AI materially lowers documentation overhead—factors that support the market score of 92/100 and revenue potential of 88/100. To stand out in a medium-competition market, focus on deep pre-built integrations (Okta, AWS/GCP/Azure, common SIEMs), standardized, auditor-accepted evidence templates, and launching with a network of mid-tier CPA partners to reduce attestation friction. The main challenges are earning auditor trust, limiting legal and liability exposure around attestations, and handling varied customer scopes; to mitigate these, emphasize security and compliance of your platform, clearly productize the line between tooling and audit opinion, and target low-complexity customers first to validate unit economics.

Market Opportunity

Prove SOC 2 trust affordably: automated controls, docs & attestations targets a $6.0B = 2M software/cloud companies x $3,000 ACV (compliance tooling + prep & verification services) total addressable market with medium saturation and a year-over-year growth rate of 18% CAGR for GRC and compliance tooling as enterprises push requirements down the supply chain.

Key trends driving demand: Vendor trust requirements -- More enterprise buyers demand SOC 2 from upstream vendors, expanding the addressable market for small vendors.; API-first cloud infra -- Centralized logs, identity providers and cloud APIs make automated evidence collection feasible at scale.; AI-assisted documentation -- LLMs enable rapid generation of tailored policies and mapping to SOC 2 controls, reducing manual drafting time.; Shift to remote auditing -- Remote evidence review and continuous monitoring reduce auditor time and cost, enabling lower-priced attestations..

Key competitors include Vanta, Drata, Secureframe, Consulting & Audit Firms (A-LIGN, BDO, KPMG advisors), Workarounds: Templates & Self-attestation (e.g., GitHub repos, free policy templates).

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Prove SOC 2 trust affordably: automated controls, docs & attestations

Executive Summary

Market Validation

Market Opportunity

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