Black Kite

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Founder: Candan Bolukbas
Founding: 2016
Mission: To build the most trustworthy cyber rating system in the world
Employees: 120 & 60% Local
Workplace: Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: Series B & $33M Raised
Investors: Volition Capital, Glasswing Ventures, Data Point Capital & Moore Strategic Ventures
Key Customers: IBM, BlueCross BlueShield, Markel, LinkedIn, Levi’s, H&R Block
Glassdoor Rating: 4.8

Black Kite provides third party cyber risk intelligence software. This cybersecurity startup was founded in 2016 by Candan Bolukbas, a former CEH (certified ethical hacker) for NATO. They’re on a mission to build the most trustworthy cyber rating system in the world.

Before we talk about what the Black Kite team is working on, we’ve got to set the stage. Candan was working for NATO in the 2000’s trying to help its member nations spot weaknesses in third party vendor networks that threatened their national security. While we all like to imagine Tom Cruise-like characters breaking into secret facilities to steal intelligence, the reality is a lot more…boring. Like, someone working a desk at a power grid and they click on the wrong email attachment. It only takes a single weakness for a non-ethical hacker to find their way in and compromise a power grid, utility network, intelligence facility, and on and on.

If you don’t know too much about cybersecurity, know this: 

  • Cybersecurity statistics indicate that there are 2,200 cyber attacks per day, with a cyber attack happening every 39 seconds on average.
  • In the US, a data breach costs an average of $9.44M
  • Cybercrime is predicted to cost $8 trillion by 2023

Candan had the idea that there were natural commercial applications for the third party risk assessment framework he was testing with nation states. Companies can have fortress balance sheets and top of the line security but historically third party vendor networks are the most susceptible pathways to triggering a cyber breach. Some statistics have 1 in 4 organizations suffering a cyber attack within the past year. These attacks cause losses in production, reputation, and financial loss. 

Black Kite is building a risk management platform for companies to better understand, evaluate, and monitor their vendor risk by building the world’s premier third-party cyber risk monitoring platform. From a hacker’s perspective. They focus on third party supply chain vulnerability, visibility, and awareness. 

Black Kite does all the hard work of aggregating visibility and measurement of the “supply side” (third party vendors) to score them across 20 categories like application security, DDoS resiliency, web ranking & more in order to offer a measurement platform that helps companies see where they’re most susceptible.

The Black Kite platform is helping to spark a revolution for what third party cyber risk intelligence means to businesses today. Black Kite’s new tagging feature automatically flags vendors who have experienced a data breach, ransomware attack or other significant cyber incident. They’re focused on technical, financial, and compliance factors in order to grade your supply chain risk, offer quantitative risks, and even meet compliance requirements. Within hours.

With 500+ customers across the globe and counting, customer growth up 5x over the last 3 years, and 25 billion lines of global cyber data measured, they’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. Black Kite’s GTM & Operations teams sit in Boston and many of their technical team members work in Turkey. Black Kite provides the only standards-based cyber risk assessments that analyze your supply chain’s cybersecurity posture from three critical dimensions: technical, financial, and compliance.

Operators to Know (Locally):

Key Roles To Be Hired:

If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:

  • Could you share some details about the onboarding process & training? 
  • What are the biggest challenges as you scale the team past 100 employees? 
  • What is the long term vision for the company? 
  • What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2023 / / teams that need the most help?
  • What is the culture of Black Kite? How are you working to build and improve on this culture each day?
  • How do you set your employees up for future success, past the day to day achievements? 

We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Black Kite you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more trustworthy cybersecurity tools & intelligence into digital corporate environments. All ethical citizens of the Internet applaud your efforts. See you around town!

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