Enterprises generally rely on countless different cloud service providers, suppliers and other third parties to support day-to-day operations. Recent history has shown that it can take just one such partner to be hit by a breach for sensitive data to get compromised.

Salt Lake City-based RiskRecon Inc. is one of the players trying to mitigate this risk. The startup today announced that it has raised a $25 million funding round led by Accel with participation from Dell Technologies Inc. and other returning investors.

RiskRecon has developed a third party risk assessment platform it claims is used by more than 50 Fortune 500 companies. The startup’s goal is to replace the questionnaires and other traditional methods that have historically been used to assess partners’ security posture. As RiskRecon sees it, performing the task manually is becoming impractical as the number of cloud services that enterprises use continues to grow.

The startup’s platform carries out security assessments automatically. RiskRecon analyzes the attack surface of a company based on 39 criteria that include technical details such as if publicly accessible systems implement encryption effectively, as well as higher-level information. Among the factors in this latter category is whether or not an organization has a history of suffering data breaches.

From there, RiskRecon prioritizes issues in order of severity so customers can tackle the biggest risks first. When additional context is needed, an organization can use the platform to see how a partner’s security posture has changed over time and how it compares to competitors.

“Third-party risk management is the process of holding enterprises accountable to good security practices,” RiskRecon Chief Executive Officer Kelly White said in a prepared statement. “As you improve the risk management of your third parties, you improve the collective security of the internet.”

RiskRecon claims its customer base has more than tripled over the past 12 months. That’s particularly impressive given that the startup is competing in a crowded market with several other venture-backed players. RiskRecon’s rivals include CyberGRX Inc. and SecurityScorecard Inc., which raised $27.5 million late last year.

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