Todd Stone built ProcessUnity. Then came the handoff.

A founder can spend years making himself necessary. Todd Stone’s more interesting move came when he made room for somebody else. On November 19, 2019, ProcessUnity named Sean Cronin its chief executive. Stone, who had co-founded the business in 2003, stayed on as chairman. The company had a successor; the founder had another chapter ahead. Enterprise software rarely supplies a theatrical exit, and this one had the good manners to avoid demanding one.

Stone described the timing as right for a transition. His announcement made a practical distinction: front-line duties could change hands while the relationship continued. After roughly sixteen years at the helm, he was transferring a job he knew intimately. In 2020, he co-founded Zengines. The problems would change, from managing third-party risk to making enterprise data usable. The work would remain close to the machinery.

From writing software to selling the consequences

Stone’s career began at IBM in 1981, as a software developer in Bethesda, Maryland. Between 1985 and 1988, an assignment took him to Portsmouth, England, where he led an international product development team. Back from Britain, he moved into IBM sales, serving global financial services customers for five years. He had crossed from building the product to explaining why an institution should buy it.

Next came North American sales at Ontos, an object-oriented database startup, and senior partnership at Computer Sciences Corporation. At CSC, his responsibilities included advanced technology services and global alliances, spanning architecture, information security, data warehousing and business modeling. His education was in industrial engineering at Lehigh University. Taken together, those jobs offer a useful way to read his later companies: systems, customers, and the complicated negotiations between them.

Enterprise technology has a peculiar social life. A piece of software may be bought by one department, used by another, and questioned by a third. A developer’s elegant answer must survive all three. Stone’s early itinerary put him on several sides of that conversation, long before he became responsible for a company of his own.

Giving the spreadsheet a more demanding job

ProcessUnity’s subject was the extended enterprise: the suppliers, service providers and other outside organizations on which a business depends. The awkward feature of outsourcing is that responsibility tends to linger after the work has left the building. A vendor’s security practices, policies and performance can become a customer’s problem. Keeping track of those relationships is a substantial business in itself.

The company’s cloud software helped organizations assess, measure and manage risk. By 2018, its Vendor Cloud offering automated onboarding, due diligence and assessment, giving financial services firms and commercial enterprises an alternative to manual spreadsheets and older systems. Stone had built a business around information that people needed to collect repeatedly, review carefully and act upon.

There was more to the company than a single risk questionnaire. Its applications also covered policies, compliance and service delivery. In 2014, ProcessUnity was adding experienced financial services staff to its Service Delivery Risk Management business, which tracked standard and non-standard services for each client. That detail makes the company less abstract: the work included keeping a record of what had actually been promised and delivered. A modest-sounding task, until the promises multiply.

Building that business meant bringing in people who knew its customers’ difficulties. In September 2013, Stone’s company hired John Nye to lead its Technology Risk Management business. The work addressed a consequence of relying on external providers: an organization could inherit risks through its partners and subcontractors. ProcessUnity’s risk applications helped identify those exposures and design and test controls. There was a technical product to develop, and a market that needed people able to explain why the controls mattered.

In April 2014, Andrew Cacossa joined to lead sales and business development for Risk Suite. Stone said ProcessUnity had doubled headcount during the previous nine months. Cacossa brought experience from CaseWare, IBM, PeopleSoft, Wolters-Kluwer and OpenPages. The appointments give those early growth years some human scale. An expanding software company needed more than additional seats: it needed knowledge of the field, relationships with buyers and the ability to turn a risk-management problem into a product a customer could use.

The handoff began before the announcement

Cronin became president in January 2016, taking responsibility for revenue growth and daily operations. The promotion followed a period in which ProcessUnity reported more than doubling annual revenue, tripling its customer base and retaining more than 95 percent of customers under his leadership. Stone’s endorsement was direct: “Sean is a natural leader.” He particularly praised Cronin’s contact with customers, partners and industry experts.

The organization was changing around them, too. In September 2017, Cronin and former Fidelity executive Richard Wastcoat joined the board. In September 2018, Long Ridge Equity Partners made a majority growth investment. The transaction provided growth capital and partial liquidity for existing shareholders. The following month, ProcessUnity added Brian Owen, Kevin Bhatt and Jason Melton to its board. A founder’s company was acquiring a wider circle of responsibility.

“This is the perfect time for me to transition my front-line CEO duties.”

Todd Stone · November 2019

When Cronin took over as CEO in 2019, he had already spent years inside the business. Stone continued as chairman. Read in sequence, the appointments show a transfer prepared through operating authority and board participation. Succession can sound like a ceremonial subject. Here, it had dates, roles and a person already doing much of the work.

Long Ridge’s account of its 2018–2021 partnership records roughly threefold annual recurring revenue growth and sixfold enterprise value growth across that period. Those are company results spanning the leadership transition. They belong to a continuing organization and its team. That distinction matters in Stone’s story: a business that keeps developing after its founder changes roles has passed a fairly exacting test.

Another company, another stubborn chore

Zengines began in 2020 with Stone, Caitlyn Truong and Carl Drisko as co-founders. Truong is CEO. Stone is president, overseeing operations, finance and administration. Drisko, formerly CTO, is now a strategic advisor. The allocation of jobs is revealing in its own ordinary way. Stone returned to company building with responsibility for the functions that keep an enterprise standing while its product finds customers.

The new business tackled data conversion: getting information out of one system and into another in a form that still works. Buying a new application is a decision; moving the old information into it is a project. The information arrives with field names, formats, rules and exceptions. It can be impressively loyal to the system everyone intends to leave.

In March 2023, Zengines announced $5 million in funding led by Hyde Park Venture Partners, with participation from Hyde Park Angels. Its platform organized conversion into three connected tasks: analyzing the source and target, mapping and transforming the information, and loading and validating it. The company aimed to reduce the time, cost and risk of implementation. Stone’s new setting brought him back to the practical interval between technology purchased and technology working.

The past has business rules of its own

By November 2024, Zengines had announced another $9 million financing and a software release that included data lineage. Migration asks how information can move. Lineage asks where it came from and what happened along the way. The company’s software examined jobs, schedules, scripts and COBOL source code to expose the logic behind a transformed value. That is a different sort of corporate memory, written in instructions.

The distinction gives Stone’s second venture a particular character. Financial institutions can have years of business decisions embedded in their systems. A number may be easy to display and difficult to explain. Modernizing the application does not make the explanation expendable. A new interface can be charming; an unexplained calculation is considerably less sociable when somebody asks to check it.

Zengines’ approach puts business analysts closer to this work, allowing them to investigate data and run conversions without coding expertise. That emphasis connects the technical product to the people accountable for understanding the information. The question becomes less about admiring the machinery and more about whether somebody can inspect what it has done.

In May 2026, Zengines announced that its Contextual Data Lineage solution had won Best of Show at FinovateSpring. The recognition belonged to the company’s product and team. For Stone, it marked a visible development in the business he had helped start six years earlier, after leaving ProcessUnity’s daily leadership.

Room for the next person, and the next problem

Outside work, Stone’s interests include hiking, mountain biking and cross-country skiing. Concord, Massachusetts, is home; he and his wife Elise raised four children there. These are small, useful details beside the corporate dates. They place the founder in a town and give the calendar something other than financing rounds and product releases to contain.

His professional story now has two distinct acts: building ProcessUnity, then helping build Zengines in a different role. The first included arranging capital and bringing a successor forward. The second puts operations, finance and administration alongside a product concerned with the history hidden inside data. Both demand attention to how organizations actually function.

There is a quiet pleasure in the sequence. After years spent helping businesses examine the risks in their outside relationships, Stone helped start a company examining the logic in their internal systems. The location of the difficult question changed. His career kept returning to work that institutions cannot simply wish away. And when it was time to hand over the CEO’s chair, he found another useful place to sit.