Exclusive: Whistic Raises $12M Series A To Automate Security Reviews

Whistic, a vendor security management platform for both buyers and sellers, secured a $12 million Series A round of funding led by Emergence Capital.

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Most of the data breaches we hear about in the news stem from hackers who infiltrated a company via one of their third-party vendors, Nick Sorensen, Whistic CEO told Crunchbase News.

The Pleasant Grove, Utah-based company focuses on proactive vendor security, enabling customers that store or process sensitive data to conduct and respond to vendor security reviews, as well as respond to buyers’ requests for security compliance information via a single platform.

Emergence1 led the round with participation from Album VC and existing investors. The company raised $4 million in other rounds, including a small bit of angel investments, giving Whistic just over $16 million in total funding since the company was founded in 2015, according to Crunchbase data.

“We will be building out our product and sales and marketing teams, as well as strengthening the platform,” Sorensen said. “We have a buyer side, a seller side and a trust catalog in the middle, so we are going to work on integrating those pieces in a better manner.”

He also said the raise was performed 100 percent virtually. Emergence’s Gordon Ritter and Carlotta Siniscalco will join Whistic’s board of directors as a part of this funding round.

“We had a great experience meeting the Emergence team, and I think had a chance to spend even more time together than we would have, especially getting to know Gordon and Carlotta, who are joining our board,” Sorensen added.

Over the past year, Whistic grew its employees to 40, a quadruple growth, and plans to add another 10 employees in the next month. In terms of revenue and customer growth, the company is consistently tripling its revenue year over year, as well as seeing hundreds of companies invited to the platform each week, according to Sorensen.

The company launched its Whistic Trust Catalog in 2019, which now has more than 14,000 company profiles that are accessible on-demand.

Many of the brands using the platform include Okta, Airbnb, Betterment, Qualtrics and Finicity. Customers have told Sorensen that Whistic has enabled them to take the process of reviewing security questionnaires—one that normally took 12 weeks—and shrink it down to two weeks. In addition, instead of it taking six hours a day for each vendor, it could be done in as little as 20 minutes, he said.

“With more data breaches happening and the more regulations, it requires you to pay attention to these third-party vendors,” he added. “Many companies are outsourcing security into the hands of third parties. We need a new model to address that, and that is what we are getting at.”

Photo courtesy of Whistic
Illustration: iStock