Toronto, June 11, 2025

VerifyWise, a Canadian startup dedicated to making responsible AI practical for any size team, announced its public launch today. The company’s platform, released under an open source license, brings the power and structure of expensive governance tools to an open repository that anyone can inspect, improve, and run themselves. 20 organizations in finance, health, manufacturing and public services are already piloting the platform, proving that transparent controls can move as fast as modern product cycles.

VerifyWise is the first open-source governance platform purpose-built for AI compliance. It’s like combining GitHub’s openness with DocuSign’s trust and auditability: transparent, verifiable, and finally built for how AI governance actually works.

Traditional governance tools arrive as closed boxes. They impose rigid workflows, opaque control mappings, and very expensive per-seat pricing that limits scale. Evidence collection becomes manual, audit trails get fragmented, and compliance posture suffers. Vanta and Drata transformed SaaS security assurance. VerifyWise is doing the same for AI compliance: cutting costs, shortening audit cycles, and offering a transparent, self-hosted alternative tailored for today’s risk and compliance teams.

“We built VerifyWise after hearing the same story again and again,” said co-founder and CEO Dr. Gorkem Cetin. “Product owners knew new rules were coming, but using most paid toolkits felt like renting a toolbox and not being allowed to open it. They wanted clarity, speed, and a chance to hack on the rules themselves. Our AI powered platform lets them do that while still satisfying auditors. It’s governance that feels intuitive, not paperwork.”

What’s inside the first release

• ISO 42001 and EU AI Act workflows: AI powered, pre-built controls, evidence gathering, and one-click audit exports aligned with the new international AI management standard.

• Risk registers: Track and document AI-specific risks across systems, use cases, and departments. Link them to controls, mitigation plans, and compliance obligations for a clear view of your AI risk posture.

• Fairness and bias checks: Automatic scans of training data and model outputs with clear visual flags, dashboards, remediation playbooks and evidence.

• AI literacy hub: Keeps a record of all mandatory AI-related training within the company: what was done, by whom, and when. This helps meet the documentation and auditing requirements of the EU AI Act and ISO42001.

• Vendors: Track 3rd party AI vendors and models in use across your organization. Assign internal risk levels, and link them to your own control framework for external assurance, monitoring and visibility.

For VerifyWise, setup from the installation to first baseline scan takes less than thirty minutes. Early pilot users report an 80% cut in internal audit preparation. The project has already merged more than 850 external pull requests, a signal that the open governance community has been waiting for an anchor repository for open source AI governance.

“VerifyWise replaced three spreadsheets, two home-grown scripts, and a monthly compliance fire-drill,” said the chief risk officer at a European fintech that joined the private beta. “My team reads the requirements, submits evidences and the reviewer checks them in place. The AI-written answers save us a lot of time.”

The core founders funded development themselves while working remotely across Toronto, Vancouver and Istanbul. Talks with a global venture capital firm are underway to accelerate hiring and build out additional regulatory playbooks covering SOC 2, NIST RMF, and country specific regulations. 

Developers and compliance leads can explore the code at GitHub or view a live demo at verifywise.ai. For interview requests and press materials contact press@verifywise.ai