Cybersecurity risk management startup Axio Global Inc. announced today that it has raised $25 million in new funding to accelerate its mission of empowering security and business leaders to discover and respond to the cyber risks that most affect their organizations.

ISTARI led the Series B round, with existing investors NFP Ventures and IA Capital Group also participating. Including the new funding, Axio has raised $30 million to date, including a Series A1 round in June 2020.

Founded in 2016, Axio offers cyber management software designed to allow security leaders to build and optimize security programs and quantify risk in financial terms. The company’s Axio360 platform enables ongoing visibility and actionable insights across the organization, including cyber risk quantification, cybersecurity assessment, financial stress testing and prioritization.

Axio says its software provides a holistic view that gives enterprises an understanding of what is at risk, how to protect against risk, examines the balance sheet protections needed to backstop cyber risk and how to optimize cyber risk management.

The company’s solution is aimed at addressing the recent growth in cyberattacks that have exposed widespread enterprise susceptibility to business-crippling events such as ransomware, demonstrating what Axio claims is an inadequacy of status-quo approaches to cyber risk management. The company argues that companies require a modern, risk-based approach to cyber risk decision-making, which hinges on the ability to quantify cyber risk in financial terms.

“The attack landscape has demonstrated that old, faith-based strategies that simply layer on controls without a clear understanding of what to prioritize have done little to reduce susceptibility,” Scott Kannry, co-founder and chief executive of Axio, said in a statement.

The company says it has seen significant adoption of its solution across various industries, with a particular focus on sectors such as energy, utilities and other areas of critical infrastructure. Three of the largest 10 North American utility providers use it, along with two of the top five North American oil and gas providers.

Axio co-founder and President David White commented that “we started this company to help CISOs understand how they should spend their next dollar, through risk mitigation or risk transfer (insurance). Cyberattacks will happen and since hackers are continuously innovating, CISOs need to improve in tandem to ensure cyber resilience.”

Photo: Axio/Twitter