About Us

VisibleThread drives compliance, flags risky content and improves probability of win.

Our History

VisibleThread is an innovative product that addresses a critical business need where knowing a document exists, such as for project specifications, is not enough, and there is a need to go further to eliminate ambiguities and gain insight into content compliance.


Michael Azoff, Principal Analyst, Ovum

VisibleThread was founded in 2008. Coming from a background of large scale IT Delivery, we observed that poorly written specifications & documented requirements accounted for up to 40%* of wasted program dollars.

We identified the need to address document quality by scanning the content and identifying risk. Existing methods were purely manual, involving time-consuming review cycles, dependent on scarce expertise and hard to coordinate. There had to be a better way!

Others agreed. VisibleThread went into private alpha/beta releases during 2008 and early 2009 with over 50 deployments. In May of 2009, we secured $1.5m in seed funding. We went to public beta in Q3, 2009, followed by a first GA (General Availability) product release in Q4 2009.

Our first corporate customers came on board early 2010. Our US Baltimore office was established the same quarter. Our first fortune 1000 customer in Q2, 2010. We have been growing ever since and now work with many of the fortune 1000 and leading integrators.


* Hooks and Farry, 2001.

How do we help?

Proposal Development

Read this data sheet to see how VisibleThread can drive compliance and better outcomes.


IT Delivery

Read this data sheet to see how VisibleThread can lower IT Delivery risk and provide program insight.

Our document content analysis software identifies defects and streamlines document compliance. The software enables users to scan MS Office and PDF docs for liability concerns, automatically create compliance documents, coordinate and track changes from multiple stakeholders, and provide project oversight.

Today the company offers VisibleThread for contract specialists, capture managers, proposal response teams, legal reviewers and IT development teams. The identification of compliance, legal, and delivery concerns through automated scans enables proposal response teams to improve efficiency and increase their probability of winning government and commercial contracts.

Who we work with?

Our customers come from two areas: IT Delivery and Bid / Proposal Development. In the IT sector, we work with many of the leading US Banks.

During the latter part of 2010, some of our IT customers started using VisibleThread for Bid Development. Interestingly, the same pain that applied to IT equally applied in this space. Bid Development is time intensive, highly manual and very document centric.

The product was such that IT scans could be swapped for Compliance and Contract Liability scans. Identifying contract risk and the ability to foster efficient rainbow team reviews resulted in our engaging with some of the leading US Federal government integrators

Click to see how we can help Bid / Proposal Managers and IT Delivery Teams.

VisibleThread for IT

2:48 minutes
This summary overview shows the business case for using VisibleThread for IT programs. It shows why up to 42% of IT project cost can be attributed to defective documentation and demonstrates how VisibleThread addresses this large business issue.

Red-flagging Bad Language

3:47 minutes
There are some words/phrases that you should avoid in a proposal. This short video shows how VisibleThread scans and red-flags 'bad language' in your RFP Responses.

Using Discovery to spot Gaps

2:28 minutes
Identification of key concepts in issued documents (RFP etc.) helps align the language of the response volumes. Discovery in VisibleThread can uncover mismatches and lack of alignment between issuer and response docs to support reviews and underpin a winning bid.

Validating Win Theme Language

4:43 minutes
Win themes articulate business differentiation. Too often, with multiple contributors and authors, it is hard to keep theme language consistent.

Here we see how VisibleThread validates response docs against win themes by:

A starter compliance matrix in 3 minutes

4:20 minutes
Proposal Managers have to manually scan issued documents or pdfs to spot requirements prefaced with 'shall', 'must' etc. and track them in spreadsheets. This demo shows an 'obligation scan' run against a draft RFP pdf. All instances of 'will', 'must', 'shall' are identified. It concludes by generating a first pass of an Excel Compliance Matrix.

Collaborations and Team Reviews with
Discussions

5:31 minutes
Managing inputs from multiple contributors and conducting efficient team reviews is critical to successful outcomes. This demo shows how VisibleThread supports collaboration using web based discussions.

Integrating with MS SharePoint

2:36 minutes
VisibleThread integrates with MS SharePoint using an intuitive import capability. This short demo shows how you can import an MS SharePoint document for analysis.

Plain Language Analysis

4:11 minutes
Plain Language Analysis drives clear documentation. This demo outlines how VisibleThread can identify long sentences, passive langauge and facilitate plain langauge audits.