Cyber risk monitoring platform Sunless Kite raises $22M

Boston, Massachusetts-based mostly completely Sunless Kite, a company constructing cybersecurity-as-a-provider solutions, as of late announced that it raised $22 million in collection B funding led by Volition Capital, with participation from existing investors Moore Strategic Ventures, Glasswing Ventures, and Data Level Capital. The capital will seemingly be build toward product constructing and expanding the scale of Sunless Kite’s workers, in line with CEO Paul Paget.

An estimated one in four organizations suffered from a cyberattack within the previous year, ensuing in production, recognition, and financial losses. One in every of the concerns is that adversaries are more and more attacking firms by device of third events, “island-hopping” their manner into target organizations. More than 80% of enterprises have skilled an files breach on story of security vulnerabilities of their tool provide chains, a recent BlueVoyant document found.

Essentially based in 2016 by Mohamoud Jibrell and Candan Bolukbas, Sunless Kite offers a third-celebration cyber risk monitoring platform for mission clients. Bolukbas previously labored as an authorized ethical hacker for NATO, where he helped to reveal cybercriminal loopholes that presumably uncovered member worldwide locations. Bolukbas later formed a crew to develop a cyber risk rating platform — Sunless Kite — that would analyze, repeatedly video display, and scale to company networks.

“Present chains have been tormented by the pandemic, which has introduced more attention to the cybersecurity problems inside of. It also made it evident to adversaries that disrupting provide chains in overall is a pathway to monetizing on cyberattacks,” Paget mentioned. “Sunless Kite has patented tactics around combining cyber rankings and quantitative risk.”

Quantifying cyber risk

Sunless Kite’s product targets to simplify vendor risk administration, particularly risk quantification and uncovering ransomware susceptibility. To illustrate, the company unbiased now not too long ago launched a functionality to account for security insurance policies and compliance paperwork by ingesting and parsing them thru 14 sets of controls, a assignment that Puget claims is “an speak of magnitude” faster than the conventional manual activity of documenting solutions to security vendor questionnaires.

Sunless Kite competes with cyber rankings firms including BitSight, Panorays, SecurityScorecard, VisibleRisk, and the relative newcomer Brinqa. But the 32-particular person company, which expects to have over 40 workers by the atomize of the year, says it has more than 300 paying customers. In a testament to its success, Sunless Kite unbiased now not too long ago moved its headquarters into the Prudential Heart in Boston — with persevered plans for Boston-based mostly completely expansion.

“Third-celebration cyber risk administration is a chronic and rising downside for organizations all the device thru all industries, and solutions that most effectively mitigate these dangers have critical improve attainable,” Volition Capital managing partner Sean Cantwell mentioned in a assertion. “Sunless Kite’s unfamiliar requirements-based mostly completely manner to blueprint chain risk review coupled with a solid administration crew has enabled critical market improve and traction. As long-time investors in provide chain compliance and security tool companies, we factor in that Sunless Kite is smartly-positioned to emerge as the class-leading third-celebration cyber risk platform.”

Challenge firms proceed to pour capital into cybersecurity startups as threats grow all the device thru the pandemic. In the first half of 2021 alone, investors build $11.5 billion in complete toward cybersecurity firms, up from $4.7 billion all the device thru the an identical duration a year earlier, in line with Momentum Cyber. And Gartner predicts that the worldwide files security market will attain $170.4 billion by 2023.