BOSTON– Kintent, creator of the Trust Cloud compliance platform, announced a Series Seed capital raise of $4 million, led by Tola Capital.
The round also included several experienced cloud, SaaS, security and legal experts including Jason Zander (EVP, Microsoft Azure), Chris Hecht (Head of Corporate Development, Atlassian), Carsten Thoma (former President, SAP Hybris), Jen Andre (VP of Product, Rapid7), Bob Brennan (former CEO, Veracode), and Cooley.
“Anyone would agree that trust is the foundation of every business relationship. But why don’t we continuously measure and report on our compliance and trust obligations?” asks Sravish Sridhar, Founder and CEO of Kintent. “It’s simply too difficult, expensive, and time consuming to do so. We believe that’s an injustice, and we want to fix this. With Kintent, we will live in a world in which it is effortless to earn trust in every business relationship.”
This new financing comes at a time when enterprises increasingly require questionnaire-based security assessments and multiple compliance audit certifications from their vendors, causing delays in the sales process. Vendors see the need for automated compliance to unblock sales. Since launching Trust Cloud in October 2020, demand from this growing market enabled Kintent to grow to 6-figures in ARR in the first 4 months, putting it on track to grow revenue 10x in 2021.
Trust Cloud auto-generates a tailored compliance program in minutes, as compared to the manual effort of working with consultants or using traditional GRC tools, which typically takes 3 to 6 months. Trust Cloud classifies a customer’s business and product stack based on the kinds of data each system stores and processes. This classification is then used to create the right set of controls, policies and tests that form a customer’s compliance program. Automated tests and continuous evidence verification workflows validate that the company is always compliant with its security and data privacy obligations. Trust Cloud further automates tedious tasks, such as answering security questionnaires, by pairing machine learning with intuitive design to generate accurate responses.
“Vendor security and risk assessment in an enterprise sales process is broken,” said Chris Lynch, CEO of AtScale, an intelligent data virtualization platform. “It’s a pain for both enterprises and vendors because they have to manually review and fill out painful security questionnaires. This check-the-box compliance charade is a waste of time and money because it does nothing to reduce risk. On top of that, enterprises require numerous compliance certifications like SOC 2, ISO 27001 and HIPAA.” He added, “my team was fed up with this expensive and time-consuming process. I wanted an automated way to show our customers that we are serious about being transparent, earning their trust, and proving our compliance. Kintent makes compliance effortless and measurable for us.”
Current Kintent customers including AtScale, Clipchamp, Evisort, InsideTracker, MachineMetrics, Notarize, TetraScience, and Unibuddy, use Trust Cloud to accelerate sales by streamlining numerous time-consuming security and data privacy compliance workflows with:
- Automated ISO 27001, HIPAA and SOC 2 audit-readiness in less than 3 months,
- Accurate security questionnaire responses in seconds, and
- An auto-generated website that transparently showcases their focus on trust, as well as their continuous adherence to compliance obligations.
“Several of our portfolio companies use Trust Cloud to transparently share their compliance and trust program in board meetings. We were impressed by the speed and always real-time view of the auto-generated compliance program offered by Kintent,” said Akshay Bhushan, Principal at Tola Capital. “Having seen businesses struggle to accelerate sales cycles as they tried to meet the hurdles of compliance audits and respond to security questionnaires, we immediately recognized the value of having an AI-enabled platform to unblock sales with a high-quality compliance program.”
