OpenView Leads $18M Series A in Kintent, a Security and Compliance Trust Management Platform

We couldn’t be more excited to announce our Series A investment in Kintent, a trust management platform that helps security teams automate their compliance programs and unblock sales.

Building trust in a digital-first world

Companies of all shapes and sizes are recognizing the importance of maintaining a strong cybersecurity posture. The rise of cloud and remote work means that business relationships are increasingly built online and security breaches caused by third-party software with access to company data represent a major threat. A 2021 study by the Ponemon Institute found that the average cost of a breach caused by vulnerabilities in third-party software was $4.3M, and it remains one of the most common attack vectors. Put bluntly, software buyers can no longer blindly trust their vendors when it comes to maintaining high levels of security—the stakes are simply too high.

Today, there is no one prevailing method of proving one’s security posture, though there are a few approaches that have gained traction on both the buyer and seller side in recent years:

• First, we’ve seen an increased focus on buyers requiring security certifications such as SOC 2 and ISO 27001. Achieving and maintaining compliance with these standards can be a painful, time-consuming process when done manually, and they rarely satisfy all of a buyer’s questions.
• Buyers’ requests for certifications are often accompanied by bespoke security questionnaires, which can be hundreds of questions long and take several weeks to complete.
• More recently, we’ve seen some sellers try to bypass the need for questionnaires by compiling a buyer-facing knowledge base that documents their security practices, certifications, and past audits. However, mapping each piece of documentation back to a specific control that the buyer wants in place can be challenging and buyers are often left with more questions than answers.

Today, the market sees these as separate problems. Many disparate companies have already been built in each category, addressing these problems in a silo, with a distinct line between solutions that automate internal compliance processes and others that help communicate compliance externally to accelerate sales.

We believe this fragmented approach to compliance is fundamentally broken. After all, building a trusted relationship doesn’t just start and end with a certification or sharing a bunch of point-in-time documents. It’s a collaborative exercise where buyers and sellers come to a mutual understanding of what security means to them, and work to uphold those standards over time.

Kintent believes that by bringing the internal compliance and sales acceleration processes under one roof, we can move compliance from a “check the box” exercise to a fundamental part of how companies build trusted digital relationships and, ultimately, generate revenue.

Revenue-generating compliance

Kintent’s Trust Cloud ® platform democratizes every company’s ability to quickly and cost-effectively set up, test and get audited for security and compliance certifications, automatically respond to security questionnaires, and confidently share compliance programs with prospective customers. Today, the product has three core trust services to bring compliance and sales together in one platform and enable revenue-generating compliance:

• TrustOps: Automate adherence to multiple compliance frameworks, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, CMMC Level 1, NIST 800-53, HIPAA, GDPR, ISO 27701, and CCPA
• Respond: Unblock sales by completing enterprise security questionnaires in less than 1 day, using AI
• Trust Share: Securely share data privacy and security information with customers, using a live, auto-generated portal that saves marketing budget and time

For security teams who use Kintent, compliance becomes a habit, is simple to understand and achieve, and is continuously testable so that their customers can see that they are adhering to all of their trust obligations. For sales teams, Kintent becomes a way to accelerate sales.

Over time, Kintent plans to expand into assessment tools for software buyers as well, with Kintent acting as the single source of truth for compliance and security between both parties. This unlocks an exciting opportunity to build a trusted vendor network, making the process of establishing and maintaining trust easier and more transparent than ever before.

We know that Kintent has an exciting road ahead, and we’re thrilled to welcome Sravish Sridhar, Tejas Ranade, Ivan Stoyanov, Mike Salinger, Priyanka Venkat, Kristie Hunziker, and the rest of the team to the OpenView family.

With this new investment, the team plans to double headcount across all functions. If you want to join them on the journey to enabling software buyers and sellers around the world to build trusted digital relationships, you can see their open positions here.