Craig Unger, founder and CEO, Hyperproof, with peacock. (Hyperproof Photo)

After almost four years at the company he co-founded, Craig Unger left Azuqua earlier this year to start his own company with eyes on helping other companies navigating a new and growing era of technology regulation.

HyperProof has raised almost $2 million in seed funding from several Seattle-area angel investors, GeekWire has learned. Unger confirmed the funding activity, and said he left Azuqua earlier this year to focus on the new Bellevue-based company, which aims to use a variety of modern technologies to help automate the painstaking practice of compliance.

“We are attacking the complexity associated with keeping your organization compliant and protecting your key stakeholders,” Unger said in an email. He’s not ready to discuss the specific details behind HyperProof’s flagship product, but it does check off two boxes on your 2018 cloud startup buzzword bingo card with plans to use blockchain technology and machine learning to verify the accuracy of compliance data and better understand how compliance needs evolve over time.

A fellow Seattle-area startup, Shujinko, just spun out of Pioneer Square Labs with $2.8 million in seed funding to tackle similar problems with modern compliance. With big regulations like GDPR taking hold as well as local measures like California’s privacy bill gaining support — not to mention the general wariness of Big Tech that has settled over the U.S. — compliance will likely be an increasingly important part of operating a 21st century business on the internet.

Azuqua is also focused on automating the trickier parts of running a modern company by helping customers pull data from across different cloud services. Unger co-founded the company in 2014 after a long career at Microsoft, playing key roles in several groups and ultimately running the Dynamics CRM group just before founding Azuqua.

HyperProof is already seeing interest from Silicon Valley investors, Unger said, and it sounds like a Series A round is not too far in the distant future. The company currently has eight employees, and he called the group “one of the most senior startup teams ever assembled in the area.”

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