Case Study
How Smallest.ai closes enterprise deals across all seven layers with Konfirmity
- Company
- Smallest.ai
- Industry
- Voice AI / conversational AI infrastructure
- Scope
- ISO 27001:2022 · SOC 2 Type II · ISO 42001 · HIPAA · DPDP · AI governance · Continuous GRC · TPRM
Security at every layer
From infrastructure to the AI models themselves, Konfirmity defends every security choice Smallest.ai makes — so security is designed in, not bolted on.
Logos earned, together
When enterprise buyers say yes, a lion's share of the credit goes to the compliance posture behind the deal. Konfirmity defends it, deal after deal.
Scale without compromise
The real transfer wasn't a certificate — it was learning how to build for scale while keeping security at the front. That lesson now lives in how Smallest.ai ships.
“The logos we've earned — a lion's share of that goes to Konfirmity. They defend every security choice we've made. But the bigger thing is what they taught us: how to build for scale and keep security at the front, at the same time.”
[01] The company
A proprietary voice AI platform, built in-house, built for scale
Smallest.ai builds a proprietary voice AI stack — real-time text-to-speech, speech recognition, and a voice-agent platform — that enterprises use to deploy conversational agents at production scale. Everything runs on the company's own in-house models: there is no third-party AI provider anywhere in the inference path.
That vertical ownership is a competitive advantage — and a compliance responsibility. When you build the models, host the infrastructure, and process the data, the security burden is yours end to end. For a company moving as fast as Smallest.ai, across as many regulated industries as it sells into, that responsibility only compounds with growth.
[02] The challenge
Three parallel roadmaps, one shared standard
Most companies run one roadmap. Smallest.ai runs three at once — and all three have to move without dropping the others.
There's the AI model roadmap: shipping better voice models, faster, in a category where the frontier moves monthly. There's the security roadmap: hardening infrastructure, network, application, data, and the models themselves as the surface area grows. And there's the compliance roadmap: staying certification-ready across ISO 27001, SOC 2, ISO 42001, HIPAA, and data-protection regimes spanning multiple jurisdictions — each with its own auditors, evidence, and deadlines.
The hard part isn't any one of these. It's serving all three in parallel without letting velocity on the model roadmap create debt on the security roadmap, or letting a scaling org drift out of alignment with what its compliance documents claim. In a fast-scaling company, the most common failure mode is contradiction — an answer given in one questionnaire that doesn't match the next. Smallest.ai needed a partner who could keep all three roadmaps coherent as the company grew — and, harder still, teach the team to keep them coherent themselves.
[03] The scope
Not just defended — taught how to build for scale
The engagement started where most compliance work does: get certified, answer the questionnaires, pass the audits. Konfirmity did that — but the more valuable work turned out to be something harder to put on an invoice.
As Smallest.ai scaled, the question stopped being “are we compliant today?” and became “how do we ship fast without accumulating security debt we'll pay for in six months?” That's a design question, not a checklist one. Konfirmity worked alongside the engineering and platform teams to answer it — bringing the discipline of security-by-design into how features get built, how infrastructure gets provisioned, and how the AI roadmap moves.
The result was a genuine capability transfer. Security stopped being a gate the team ran into at the end of a sprint and became a default the team designs with from the start — at every layer, from the network up through the models. For a CTO scaling a company through real chaos, that shift is the whole game: it's the difference between security that slows you down and security that lets you move faster because you're never doubling back to fix it.
[04] The solution
Konfirmity plus a gold-standard managed service
Konfirmity isn't a dashboard Smallest.ai was handed and left to run. It's an embedded, managed security-and-compliance function — a gold-standard service that operates as an extension of the team.
The philosophy is security-driven compliance: make the company genuinely secure at every layer first, then prove it with evidence that survives enterprise due diligence. Konfirmity's ISMS and GRC platform keeps controls, policies, and evidence centralised and consistent, so the three roadmaps stay in sync — a security control implemented on Monday is reflected in the compliance evidence, and defensible in the next questionnaire, without a scramble.
And Konfirmity holds the line on accuracy. Where a real gap exists, it's owned with a dated remediation plan rather than reframed — because overclaiming is exactly what turns a routine vendor review into a dead deal. That discipline is what lets Smallest.ai's answers hold up when a reviewer asks for the evidence behind them.
[05] The impact
Let any due diligence come — we're ready
The outcome enterprise sellers dream about: due diligence stops being an excuse.
With Konfirmity, Smallest.ai walks into any enterprise security review already prepared — a consistent control set, current documentation, and defensible answers across every framework a buyer might raise. The questionnaires and vendor assessments that once threatened to stall deals now move through them. Bluntly: the sales team can no longer hide behind due diligence, because due diligence is handled.
That turns compliance from a bottleneck into a growth driver. New frameworks get integrated as regulated customers demand them. Evidence stays audit-ready between cycles. And the logos keep landing — deals in the most scrutinised industries in the world, won in part because the security posture behind them holds up under the hardest scrutiny a procurement team can bring.
[06] Why choose Konfirmity
What I would tell another founder
The honest question is not which compliance tool to buy. It is whether you can afford to run a security roadmap and a compliance roadmap alongside the product roadmap that actually pays your bills.
You will never have enough resources — that is just the job
A growing company can barely staff the roadmap it already has. Put a security roadmap and a compliance roadmap on top and you do not get three workstreams moving together; you slow down the one your revenue depends on. Every engineer pulled into evidence collection is an engineer not shipping. It looks affordable on a plan and it is obvious a quarter later.
Find a partner, not a platform
A platform hands the work back to you with a nicer dashboard. When a reviewer asks the question behind the question, a dashboard cannot answer it. What we needed was someone who would sit in the review, defend the design decision we actually made, and own a gap with a dated plan instead of reframing it. If you find that, they are worth their weight in gold — and I do not say that loosely.
Selling to enterprises needs a security leader buyers trust
Your posture gets examined by people who do this professionally, and they can tell within minutes whether there is real judgement behind the answers. Amit has built and scaled a global payments company to $2B and spent his career around fast-scaling startups. He has been on the receiving end of the hardest diligence there is, at the scale where getting it wrong ends you. That is who you want in the room.
The capability has to end up with your team
The certificate was the smallest part of what we got. What compounds is my engineers designing with security at the front, so we are not doubling back to fix what shipped six months ago. The real transfer was learning how to build for scale and keep security first at the same time — and that stays with us whether or not anyone else is in the room.
Akshat Mandloi, CTO, Smallest.ai
Security paramount, despite the chaos. Every layer defended. Every deal ready.
We don’t just help customers pass audits. We make them genuinely secure at every layer, and we leave them able to build that way themselves.