Kintent is transforming compliance into a revenue-generating tool

Each expertise vendor should move shopper safety scrutiny, which is usually a time-consuming course of involving exhaustive questionnaires. Kintent, a fast-growing startup that has automated this course of, has introduced a collection A funding of $18 million, led by OpenView, with Tola Capital as a follow-on investor. Kintent will use the funds to develop its gross sales and product groups to serve its increasing buyer base and surplus lead circulation.

Kintent is an all-in-one revenue-accelerating compliance platform. The corporate automates safety compliance audit preparation, utilizing natural language processing (NLP) and machine studying (ML) to auto-suggest solutions to safety questionnaires. It then creates a stay, engaging web site and API that enables companies to share and present compliance with their prospects. 

Kintent’s primary precedence is to simplify how a buyer and provider of software program develop belief between each other, significantly within the areas of safety and data privacy compliance. The newest funding suggests the corporate has honed its enterprise mannequin and has demonstrated its path to profitability. For each firm, particularly startups, the collection A stage is often about enlargement and growing a viable enterprise mannequin that may scale upwards with future rounds of funding.

This announcement is essential to technical decision-makers, as a result of it eliminates the necessity for them to make assumptions, together with the legitimacy of an organization’s advertising and gross sales supplies. 

 The newest funding serves to provethat the corporate’s core services or products may be produced, will work as anticipated and has a market. 

Streamlining compliance, enabling income

Kintent was cofounded by Sravish Sridhar in 2020 (after the onset of COVID-19), alongside six different individuals with whom he labored in his final firm, Kinvey, which was acquired in 2017. Kintent was created with a objective of  offering a system of document for belief, with the primary use case being for data safety and information privateness compliance.  

The software that might be particularly essential for software-as-a-service (SaaS) businesses that retailer buyer data or private well being data (PHI). That is at the moment achieved by acquiring official compliance certifications or attestations to requirements reminiscent of SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR and others, in addition to finishing exhaustive safety questionnaires as a part of the gross sales course of.

The corporate’s product is known as Belief Cloud. This software makes it simpler to determine the right way to turn out to be compliant with a given customary, measure the present state of compliance and get suggestions on the right way to enhance. 

Kintent’s Belief Cloud begins  by assessing the state of your expertise’s  systemsm varieties of information being  collected and saved and compatibility of every system with the requirements the corporate is making an attempt to satisfy. The Belief Cloud then generates an inventory of finest practices to remain in compliance together with your chosen customary relying on the way you categorizecategorize your information and finally, it offers the means to proceed testing to validate what you’ve performed and that you just’re nonetheless in compliance.

“On the subject of safety questionnaires and compliance, I really feel your entire SaaS sector wants a kick within the pants. At the moment, your entire process is a hilarious absurdity. The vast majority of companies carry out the requirements to easily tick this field and procure compliance certifications,” Sridhar mentioned.  “Each gross sales workforce strives to undergo the safety questionnaire course of as rapidly as potential by answering questions that replicate what they consider the enterprise buyer needs to see as in opposition to the reality. Compliance is simply not truthful in the present day,” 

CISOs can use Kintent to objectively assess and obtain vendor safety and compliance information. The Belief Cloud software is utilized by CISOs in companies to show their safety and compliance applications from a price middle to a income enabler. In consequence, quite than zero-trust, Kintent provides express, tangible belief, during which enterprise belief is consistently confirmed programmatically. 

Mackey Craven, certainly one of OpenView’s tech business angel traders, mentioned it’s uncommon to return throughout a agency that’s so well-positioned to remodel such a big business as governance, danger and compliance (GRC).

“By reworking check-the-box compliance from a price middle right into a revenue-generating perform, Kintent is straight enabling the expansion of their prospects and experiencing nice acceptance within the business, whereas additionally constructing a extra trusted neighborhood during which to do enterprise,” Craven added.

Moreover, a accomplice at Tola Capital, Akshay Bhushan affirmed his firsthand expertise of Kintent’s potential to assist high-growth corporations throughout a number of industries execute enterprise acquisitions quicker.

“The platform gives gross sales and operational leaders with the instruments they should cope with IT and safety objections forward of time, or else gross sales can be delayed by months. Gross sales groups use Kintent to win enterprise agreements by turning round questionnaires in hours. We’re ecstatic to assist the Kintent workforce of their effort to ascertain the Belief Cloud,” Bhushan acknowledged.

The ‘compliance-as-a-service’ panorama

Kintent at the moment employs roughly 25 individuals and is completely distant and evenly dispersed. Nonetheless, by the tip of the yr, the corporate goals to have grown to 50-60 workers. Kintent has a various set of consumers, together with a number of fast-growing, security-conscious companies throughout a wide range of industries. AtScale, BitSight, ChaosSearch, DataRobot, DesktopMetal, Evisort, Jeeves, Notarize and Snyk are among the many units of Kintent’s prospects.

“We would have liked the means to automate safety assessments, present transparency to our prospects and companions about our safety program and empower our enterprise divisions to realize and preserve compliance with ease. Kintent’s AI and API-based automation combines gross sales and safety procedures into one platform, permitting us to hurry gross sales and preserve shopper confidence,” mentioned Andrew Smeaton, CISO of DataRobot.

There are a number of corporations which might be often in aggressive conditions with Kintent. Nonetheless, Kintent has received 87% of all competing provides within the final 12 months. Different aggressive corporations appear to be advertising “check-the-box” compliance. Their proposition seems to be to place compliance on autopilot and to make use of automation to gather the naked minimal of proof wanted to acquire a compliance certification speedily.

“One among our prospects who checked out a few of our opponents jokingly referred to as them ‘SOC-in-a-Field’ It’s additionally fascinating to see them compete available in the market, utilizing their enterprise capital funding to cannibalize each other’s gross sales by reducing costs each quarter. Even whereas Kintent prices greater than our opponents, we nonetheless win as a result of our prospects want revenue-generating compliance that results in gross sales over check-the-box compliance that solely obtains a certification,” mentioned Sridhar.

Kintent aspires to remodel the prevailing state of affairs from check-the-box compliance to belief. A basis of belief constructed on truthful, clear and systematic compliance verification. The corporate is working to create a future the place suppliers and prospects could talk safety and compliance data with one another utilizing APIs. In consequence, as an alternative of zero-trust, Kintent will set up a world of clear, measurable belief, the place enterprise belief is consistently confirmed programmatically.