Cyber threat monitoring platform Black Kite raises $22M

Boston, Massachusetts-based Black Kite, a enterprise creating cybersecurity-as-a-service options, today announced that it raised $22 million in series B funding led by Volition Capital, with participation from current investors Moore Strategic Ventures, Glasswing Ventures, and Data Point Capital. The capital will be place toward solution development and expanding the size of Black Kite’s workforce, according to CEO Paul Paget.

An estimated one in 4 organizations suffered from a cyberattack in the previous year, resulting in production, reputation, and economic losses. One of the difficulties is that adversaries are increasingly attacking firms by way of third parties, “island-hopping” their way into target organizations. More than 80% of enterprises have skilled a information breach as a outcome of safety vulnerabilities in their software program provide chains, a current BlueVoyant report located.

Founded in 2016 by Mohamoud Jibrell and Candan Bolukbas, Black Kite delivers a third-party cyber threat monitoring platform for enterprise consumers. Bolukbas previously worked as a certified ethical hacker for NATO, exactly where he helped to uncover cybercriminal loopholes that potentially exposed member nations. Bolukbas later formed a group to construct a cyber threat rating platform — Black Kite — that could analyze, constantly monitor, and scale to corporate networks.

“Supply chains have been affected by the pandemic, which has brought more attention to the cybersecurity problems within. It also made it evident to adversaries that disrupting supply chains can be a pathway to monetizing on cyberattacks,” Paget mentioned. “Black Kite has patented techniques around combining cyber ratings and quantitative risk.”

Quantifying cyber threat

Black Kite’s solution aims to simplify vendor threat management, especially threat quantification and uncovering ransomware susceptibility. For instance, the enterprise not too long ago released a capability to interpret safety policies and compliance documents by ingesting and parsing them by way of 14 sets of controls, a procedure that Puget claims is “an order of magnitude” quicker than the common manual process of documenting answers to safety vendor questionnaires.

Black Kite competes with cyber ratings firms such as BitSight, Panorays, SecurityScorecard, VisibleRisk, and the relative newcomer Brinqa. But the 32-particular person enterprise, which expects to have more than 40 workers by the finish of the year, says it has more than 300 paying consumers. In a testament to its accomplishment, Black Kite not too long ago moved its headquarters into the Prudential Center in Boston — with continued plans for Boston-based expansion.

“Third-party cyber risk management is a persistent and growing concern for organizations across all industries, and solutions that most effectively mitigate these risks have significant growth potential,” Volition Capital managing companion Sean Cantwell mentioned in a statement. “Black Kite’s unique standards-based approach to supply chain risk assessment coupled with a strong management team has enabled significant market growth and traction. As long-time investors in supply chain compliance and security software businesses, we believe that Black Kite is well-positioned to emerge as the category-leading third-party cyber risk platform.”

Venture firms continue to pour capital into cybersecurity startups as threats develop for the duration of the pandemic. In the 1st half of 2021 alone, investors place $11.5 billion in total toward cybersecurity firms, up from $4.7 billion for the duration of the very same period a year earlier, according to Momentum Cyber. And Gartner predicts that the worldwide details safety industry will attain $170.4 billion by 2023.

Originally appeared on: TheSpuzz