Startup VISO Trust, which helps enterprises ensure that the cloud services and other technology products they use are secure, has raised a $11 million funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures.

Work-Bench, Sierra Ventures and Lytical Ventures also participated in the round, which was announced today. The investment firms were joined by three prominent cybersecurity executives: Mandiant Inc. Chief Executive Kevin Mandia, CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. CEO George Kurtz and former Splunk Inc. CEO Doug Merritt.

Before an enterprise adopts a new technology product, it has to ensure that the product is secure. If a cloud service contains cybersecurity vulnerabilities, the business data that it holds could potentially be targeted by hackers. The same applies to on-premises applications and other types of technology products.

Enterprises evaluate the security of new solutions by sending a questionnaire to technology suppliers that covers details such as how they implement data encryption. In some cases, a company may require that a product comply with a specific regulation. In such scenarios, the cybersecurity evaluation may also include a regulatory compliance assessment carried out by a third-party firm.

The challenge VISO Trust, officially Valente Sherman Inc., has set out to address is that cybersecurity evaluations can take a significant amount of time in a large enterprise where employees may use hundreds of different software products. Additionally, cybersecurity evaluations have to be repeated on a regular basis, which creates yet more complexity. 

The company provides a cloud service that automatically analyzes cybersecurity questionnaires and other technical data from a firm’s technology suppliers to find potential risks. The service can also determine how well a product complies with relevant regulatory requirements. It supports the GDPR privacy regulation, as well as industry-specific cybersecurity standards such as the PCI DSS guidelines used in the financial sector.

VISO Trust generates a cybersecurity risk score for every product to help administrators quickly identify and fix the most urgent issues. The platform also includes a monitoring dashboard that provides high-level cybersecurity statistics, such as what percentage of the cloud applications that a company uses contain cybersecurity risks.

The company says its platform not only saves time for cybersecurity teams, but also provides other benefits. 

Because manually assessing the security of cloud applications can take hours, administrators can’t always evaluate every single service used by their company. As a result, organizations don’t always detect when workers deploy a solution that contains potential vulnerabilities. VISO Trust says that automating cybersecurity assessments makes it practical for companies to check all their technology solutions for potential vulnerabilities. 

VISO Trust also helps organizations detect if a technology product becomes less secure over time. The platform can automatically resend cybersecurity questionnaires to a company’s software suppliers at set time intervals and evaluate the results. 

“By bringing intelligence to the third-party security assessment process, risk teams can eliminate their manual and mundane tasks, like reading documents and analyzing spreadsheets, and get back to doing their intended job responsibility — solving security problems and informing business decisions to reduce risk,” said VISO Trust co-founder and CEO Paul Valente. 

VISO Trust says that its platform is used by companies such as Instacart and Cruise, General Motors Co.’s autonomous driving business. To continue its business momentum, the startup plans to more than double its headcount over the next year.

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