Black Kite - Volition Capital

Cybersecurity

Black Kite combines cybersecurity ratings, compliance controls, and probable financial loss so you can make better business decisions.

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@BlackKiteTech

Will the coming economic downturn embolden digital evil doers and nefarious cyber actors? 👹 Yes. Yes it will. But Black Kite's Cyber Evangelist Jeffrey Wheatman has an idea for you on what to expect and a few tips to help. 📝 https://t.co/bbAfEQbrFu #2023 #Cybersecurity

About Black Kite

In 2016, Black Kite began its journey to redefine third-party risk management (TPRM), building the world’s first security ratings service designed from a hacker’s perspective. With 200+ customers across the globe and counting, we’re committed to improving the health and safety of the entire planet’s cyber ecosystem with the industry’s most accurate and comprehensive cyber intelligence. While other security ratings service (SRS) providers try to narrow the scope, our non-intrusive, powerful scans tell the full story. the Company provides the only standards-based cyber risk assessments that analyze your supply chain’s cybersecurity posture from three critical dimensions: technical, financial, and compliance.

Background

Black Kite’s story began with our co-founder, Candan Bolukbas, trailblazing cybersecurity avenues as a certified ethical hacker (CEH) for NATO.

Thanks to Candan’s expertise, NATO was able to uncover existing cybercriminal loopholes exposing member countries. Candan’s work led him to an epiphany: vulnerable third party contractors were stepping stones to the primary target.

In 2016, realizing his insight had commercial implications, Candan and his team built a cyber risk rating platform that could identify, continuously monitor, and scale, sparking a revolution for what third-party cyber risk management means to businesses today—and in the future.

The Black Kite logo uniquely combines a cyber ecosystem and soaring Black Kite hawk, to signify unparalleled visibility and insight beyond the spectrum of the human eye. Our leaders, partners, and dedicated personnel are committed to uncovering emerging areas of exposure in order to reduce uncertainty around cyber risk.

Why We Invested in Black Kite

Cyber security is only as strong as its weakest link and CISOs today have a big unknown looming in their environments – third parties. Whether it’d be an organization’s supply chain partners or service providers, entities outside an organization’s firewall are holding sensitive data and/or have access to internal systems. Yet, insight into third parties’ cyber security risk levels is limited, creating a large blind spot. Black Kite, our newest portfolio company, addresses this gap.

Earlier this week, we announced a $22M Series B investment in Black Kite, a Boston-based third-party cyber risk monitoring platform. Built by former white hat hackers, the Company continuously monitors third-parties from a hacker’s point of view to identify vulnerabilities and assess an organization’s risk level. Further, it enables organizations to share their findings with third-parties alongside step-by-step instructions to mitigate the risks.

The Company sits at the intersection of two key themes for Volition: 1) third party/supply chain risk management, including portfolio companies Assent Compliance and TraceLink, and 2) cyber security, including portfolio companies Ping Identity and Securonix. We believe cyber risk will become a crucial component of every Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM) program, and the Company has developed a market-leading cyber risk management product loved by customers. We are excited to partner with the Black Kite team to support the Company through its next phase of growth. Read more about why we invested here.

Fun Facts About Black Kite

Black Kite built the team during Covid-19 lockdown, tripling in size. The company went from hiring people on Zoom, to finally getting together in person at our new office, and now hosting events.
Cornhole is the dominant sport of choice for the the Company team, so they’ve added boards to our new office—as well as a putting green for the more subdued among them..
The company celebrated its second annual summer outing, which is now a tradition, at our SVP Sales, John Sullivan’s Alpaca Farm!