VISO Trust Raises $3M Seed Round to Deliver Automated Third Party Cyber Due Diligence at the Speed of Business

SAN FRANCISCO, April 28, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, VISO Trust announced that it has raised $3M in Seed funding to automate third party cyber due diligence with an AI-driven social due diligence network. Work-Bench led the round with additional participation from Sierra Ventures and Lytical Ventures. Kelley Mak, Principal at Work-Bench, will join VISO Trust's Board of Directors.

Today, more than 65% of security breaches occur because of third party failures. While the need for faster vendor security reviews has prompted some companies to use abbreviated questionnaires or outside-in assessments to conduct shorter reviews, security analysts still spend hours every day sending and processing third party security questionnaires. VISO Trust's automated due diligence platform provides the accurate, actionable intelligence needed to make sound risk decisions by freeing relevant data from artifacts that third parties already have.

"In my career as a Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), I've learned that security and risk leaders want automated due diligence that can scale, not cumbersome survey mechanisms or dubious network scans," said Paul Valente, co-founder and CEO of VISO Trust. "By bringing intelligence to the third party security assessment process, risk teams can eliminate their manual and mundane tasks, like reading documents and analyzing spreadsheets, and get back to doing their intended job responsibility - solving security problems and informing business decisions to reduce risk."

VISO Trust offers a complete view of risk and can scale, leveraging a social due diligence network and curated artificial intelligence to eliminate questionnaires and deliver continuous, automated due diligence quickly and accurately across any number of third parties.

"The proliferation of SaaS tools, reliance on partners, and the hidden risk of third parties has shown that there's a massive need in the market for vendor risk solutions that scale with the speed of business. We've talked to many security teams who are hamstrung by very manual and cumbersome processes for doing due diligence, which is often through the lengthy exchange of documents and spreadsheets," said Kelley Mak, Principal at Work-Bench. "As previous security leaders and practitioners, there couldn't be a more suited team to tackle the problem since they've lived it first hand."

VISO Trust has designed the platform to be intuitive for users - integrating easily into existing workflows without costly implementation or required customization. As a result, Security Analysts using VISO Trust report that they are able to spend 90% less time on assessments, while providing meaningful results to stakeholders in days rather than weeks or months.

"VISO Trust has enabled us to bring the security staff time per relationship down from more than 8 hours to only 30 minutes - for us that's gold," said James Nelson, VP of Information Security at Illumio. "All of our stakeholders love it because it is so fast. VISO Trust is saving us tremendous time and risk," adds Maria Thompson-Saeb, Senior Program Manager Governance, Risk, and Compliance at Illumio.

"We were impressed by the rapid progress VISO Trust has made with newer agile customers like Illumio as well as larger enterprises," said Mark Fernandes, Managing Director at Sierra Ventures. "Our Sierra CXO Advisory Board reviews emerging technologies expected to impact the enterprise, and after taking a look at the VISO Trust team and product, they gave us very positive feedback."

"At the seed stage, success is largely driven by the team. When we looked at Paul and Russ and saw their background, intellectual honesty and chemistry, we knew this was a team we wanted to back," said Steve Berg, Partner at Lytical Ventures. "The main investment focus of Lytical Ventures is cyber and AI, so we naturally have great synergy with VISO Trust."

VISO Trust was co-founded by former CISO Paul Valente (CEO) and veteran security and technology leader Russell Sherman (CTO). Both have lived on each side of this problem, previously managing thousands of third parties at highly regulated technology companies including LendingClub and ASAPP, and spending years building security programs and software to support technology products in use by the Fortune 1000.

About VISO Trust

VISO Trust is delivering continuous automated cyber due diligence for the modern enterprise. By leveraging social due diligence and curated artificial intelligence, VISO Trust delivers the timely, accurate information needed to make good risk decisions at the speed of business. The company was founded in 2020 and is based in San Francisco. Learn more at www.visotrust.com.

SOURCE VISO Trust