How Openlane traded a folder of Chrome tabs for an always-on competitive edge

“Now that I really know the value of competitive intelligence, I don’t think I could go back.” - Kelsey Waters, CEO @ Openlane

When Kelsey Waters needed to keep tabs on the dozen-plus companies competing in compliance automation, her system was a folder of Chrome tabs she refreshed by hand. Today, the CEO and co-founder of Openlane runs her competitive intelligence software out of a Slack channel — and one of the stories it surfaced ended up in her fundraising pitch.

About Openlane

Openlane is the open-source, AI-native alternative to bloated GRC suites like Vanta and Drata. The San Antonio-based startup helps growing companies get and stay compliant across more than a dozen frameworks — SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR, PCI DSS, NIST — on a developer-first platform built around transparent pricing and an extensible API. Their pitch is plain: “Compliance isn’t magic. Stop paying for illusions.” For a young company in one of the most crowded categories in B2B software, knowing what every other vendor is doing isn’t optional. It’s table stakes.

The challenge

Openlane plays in a market with two dominant legacy providers and a fast-growing cohort of newer entrants trying to rethink compliance automation from scratch. Kelsey needed to track all of them — and the way she was doing it wasn’t working.

“I was probably going about tracking competitors in the worst possible way. Pretty sure I had a folder in my Google Chrome tabs that just had a list of all of our competitors, and I would refresh them ad hoc.”

Things slipped through the cracks. Prospects told her about competitor announcements before she’d seen them. Bigger moves landed late. The turning point came when one of Openlane’s competitors quietly acquired another competitor — a meaningful reshuffle of the landscape that Kelsey only learned about a couple of weeks after the fact.

Why Openlane chose KeepTabz

Kelsey didn’t need an enterprise-grade competitive intelligence team. She needed an always-on system that watched the market for her and surfaced the things that actually mattered. That’s exactly what KeepTabz is built for: news, social posts, website changes, reviews, ads, and SEO across the full competitive set, scored for competitive importance by AI agents trained on B2B marketing reasoning, and delivered to wherever the team already lives. For Openlane, that’s Slack.

What clicked for Kelsey was how lightweight it felt. No two-month implementation. No $60K-a-year price tag of the legacy CI tools built for Fortune 500 marketers. KeepTabz set up fast, plugged into Slack, and started turning the chaotic surface area of a crowded compliance market into a single, scored, scannable feed. The daily digest meant she didn’t have to remember to check anything — the value came to her.

“It’s a lightweight, Slack-integrated tool that helps me keep track of the competitive landscape. And that helps me know what I’m talking about when I talk to potential clients or potential investors, which is hugely valuable to me at this stage.”

How Openlane uses KeepTabz today

KeepTabz lives next to Kelsey’s inbox and calendar in the top set of tabs in her browser, but the day-to-day touchpoint is Slack. Each morning, KeepTabz sends Openlane a digest of the highest-scoring competitor activity from the previous 24 hours — a competitor’s website change, a new social post, a piece of news, an ad campaign — pre-ranked by the Competitive Impact Score so her eye lands on what matters first.

She’s sharpened the workflow further by training herself to skip past anything below a threshold. The signal-to-noise ratio takes care of itself.

“I can see what’s the most important, whether it’s a website update or something new posted on socials or something in the news. And I have trained myself to ignore some of the lower scores, which just saves me time.”

News is the data source Kelsey leans on hardest right now. With a scandal currently unfolding in the compliance space around templated audit reports and rubber-stamped auditors, knowing how every competitor is publicly responding to that conversation is a live strategic question — not a quarterly review item.

The results

• Caught a competitor acquisition story that had previously surfaced weeks late — and folded that intelligence into an Openlane fundraising pitch.
• Replaced ad-hoc manual tab refreshing with a five-minute daily Slack scan.
• Eliminated the “client told us about it first” pattern that was eroding credibility in sales and investor conversations.
• Established a single source of truth for competitor news, social, web, and reviews across two legacy players and a long tail of new incumbents.

The biggest win isn’t a number — it’s posture. Openlane went from reactive (waiting for someone to forward an article) to proactive (walking into investor and prospect conversations already knowing more about the market than the people across the table).

“It actually made a compelling part of our pitch as part of our fundraise.”

What’s next

Openlane’s market is only getting more crowded — more frameworks, more entrants, more messaging shifts to track. Kelsey plans to lean further into KeepTabz’s social and news coverage as the templated-reports conversation evolves, and to keep feeding competitive intelligence into Openlane’s own product positioning and go-to-market motion. Built-in competitive awareness, on autopilot, is becoming part of how the company operates.

See how KeepTabz can turn a crowded category into a single Slack digest. Start a free 14-day trial or book a demo.