San Francisco cybersecurity startup Secureframe Inc. today said that it has raised $18 million in funding after six months of rapid growth during which its revenues increased tenfold.

Kleiner Perkins led the Series A round. The venture capital firm was joined by Gradient Ventures, a Google LLC fund that invests in artificial intelligence startups, and more than a dozen other backers. 

Secureframe has developed a cloud-based service that it says reduces the amount of manual work required for companies to achieve compliance with cybersecurity standards. The startup currently focuses on two standards in particular: SOC 2 and ISO 27001. Both are seen as essential for enterprise technology firms because many large businesses require their software suppliers to demonstrate SOC 2 and ISO 27001 compliance.

Meeting the two standards requires fulfilling hundreds of technical requirements in areas such as data encryption, which can sometime take months. Secureframe says it helps clients compress the process into a few weeks.

The startup’s service automatically scans a company’s infrastructure to determine whether it meets compliance requirements. Secureframe can check application environments hosted on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Corp.’s Azure and Google Cloud Platform to evaluate if they’re configured in accordance with expected best practices. Secureframe’s algorithms also detect cybersecurity compliance issues in software-as-a-service products a company relies on.

To prove that their infrastructure meets SOC 2 and ISO 27001 requirements, companies must pass an assessment conducted by an independent auditor. Secureframe says its service helps with that part of the workflow as well. The startup provides a web-based dashboard that allows auditors to quickly access technical data about the infrastructure of the company they’re evaluating, which streamlines assessments.

Secureframe told TechCrunch that the tenfold increase in revenue it has seen over the last six months, on an undisclosed base, was accompanied by over 100 customer wins. Using the new funding, the startup hopes to create more revenue growth opportunities by extending its service to additional security standards. Secureframe’s roadmap includes the healthcare industry’s HIPAA data security framework and the PCI standard that companies such as online retailers must meet to accept credit cards.

Enterprises are also investing in tools that can make it easier for them to comply with privacy regulations such as GDPR. The market for such tools is growing rapidly and as a result has drawn significant investor interest. Startup OneTrust Inc., whose cloud-based platform helps enterprises comply with GDPR and other privacy regulations, closed a $300 million funding round at the end of 2020 at a $5.1 billion valuation. 

Image: Secureframe