The first seeds of the idea that would eventually become Tentacle began to germinate within YourCause, the last business that Matt Combs - the CEO of Tentacle - founded. While trying to grow YourCause (acquired by Blackbaud), the path for growth was perpetually slowed by the industry processes used for conducting information security reviews. Be it while pitching (and winning) new business prospects, maintaining existing clients, managing third party vendors, or simply just secure the business itself: the process was inefficient. It was during these realizations that Matt vowed that he would one day address these manual, repetitive, and archaic processes.

After selling YourCause, Matt followed through on his commitment and began to investigate the marketplace for Information Security Assessments. He quickly concluded that the market had plenty of "room for improvement" - or said more directly - an opportunity to be disrupted, corrected, and significantly enhanced. So he started Tentacle and began forming his team: extremely talented infosec, software, and digital strategy experts he discovered online; a fellow volunteer he met in Zimbabwe years prior; former stand-out colleagues; and a top-notch dev crew out of Poland.