The story of SpeakUp

SpeakUp started in 2004 as a consultancy in Amsterdam. Today, more than 600 organizations across 30+ countries use our platform to give their people a safe way to raise concerns. The path from one to the other runs through a single idea: when people can speak up without fear, organizations finally get the chance to put things right. Here is how it began.

2004: how SpeakUp started

Before SpeakUp, there was People Intouch. Our founder, Rolf Thung, wanted to understand why employees stay silent about wrongdoing, so he built an unusual team to study it: cultural anthropologists, lawyers, economists, and criminologists.

What united them was the whistleblower's dilemma. Why do people hesitate to speak up? What changes when they finally do? And what do society, organizations, and the people raising concerns stand to gain when wrongdoing gets reported?

The finding was simple. When employees can report without fear of retaliation, the organization actually hears about problems while there is still time to act, before a small issue becomes a public crisis.

We were building tools for open, anonymous dialogue long before the law caught up, including our whistleblowing software. That head start shaped everything that came after.

2021: speaking up becomes law

For most of our first decade, encouraging people to report was a choice companies made, not one they had to make. The EU Whistleblowing Directive changed that. By the December 2021 deadline, organizations across Europe had to give employees a safe, confidential way to report wrongdoing, and protect them when they used it.

The question we had spent years on was now on every compliance team's desk. We used our head start to help organizations meet the requirement without turning reporting into another paperwork exercise.

2023: a refreshed identity

By 2023, the rules had reshaped the market, and compliance teams were under pressure to prove they were more than a box-ticking function. So we rebranded from People Intouch to SpeakUp, with a sharper mission: help organizations move from a compliance culture to a speak up culture, where the voices inside a company get heard.

Compliance still matters, of course. But meeting the letter of the law and building a culture where people trust you enough to report are not the same job, and you need both. After 20+ years doing this, we know they can happen together. A workforce that speaks up gives you the early warning you need to act before risk turns into damage.

2024: a new chapter

In September 2024, Tim Morss became CEO, opening SpeakUp's next chapter: faster growth and a serious push into the US market. The clearest sign of that ambition arrived the following summer.

2025: from a reporting tool to a unified suite

A whistleblowing channel answers one question: how do people report a concern? Compliance teams were asking us bigger ones. How do we handle conflicts of interest, gifts, and the disclosures that never go near a hotline? And what about the people who would rather call than type?

In July 2025, we answered both. SpeakUp Paths extended the platform beyond misconduct reporting into disclosure and approval management, giving compliance teams one place to capture and track conflicts of interest, gifts, and sponsorships. At the same time, our AI Voice Agent took on the oldest problem in reporting: the phone hotline. Instead of waiting on hold for an interpreter, a caller gets an immediate, guided conversation that becomes a structured report, with no third-party operator in between.

Underneath both sits Sienna AI, our intelligence layer, helping teams capture, process, and surface what matters across the whole suite. The result is what compliance teams had been asking for: one system, from intake to insight.

Future: where SpeakUp is headed

Our goal is straightforward: a world that speaks up. One where employees feel safe enough to raise a hand, and where organizations spend less time putting out fires because they caught the smoke early.

We sit on both sides of that conversation, protecting the person who reports and the organization they report to. Neither should pay the price for honesty. The hard part is making that actually work. Here is how we do it.

Reporting your people will actually use

Your employees can raise a concern without giving up their identity, so fear of retribution stops being a reason to stay quiet. And because the platform supports 100+ languages, a worker in São Paulo or Stuttgart can report in their own words, with nothing lost in translation.

Built for people, not paperwork

A lot of reporting tools bury a nervous employee under forms and legal language. We took the opposite approach. Someone can start with a single message, in plain words, and a two-way anonymous dialogue opens from there. Behind the scenes, that conversation becomes the structured, compliant case your investigators need, without the reporter ever having to think about it.

One report is a signal. A pattern is a warning.

A single report might be a one-off. A dozen pointing the same direction is something you need to see early. SpeakUp gives compliance and legal teams a clear view across the whole organization, including supply chain partners, so patterns surface before they become headlines.

That is the whole idea. When speaking up is easy, everyone gains: the employee who raised the concern, the team that fixed it, and the organization that never made the news for the wrong reasons. It is a world we would like to help build, one report at a time.