Black Kite is a technology company.
Black Kite has raised $34.0M across 3 funding rounds.
Black Kite has raised $34.0M in total across 3 funding rounds.
Black Kite has raised $34.0M in total across 3 funding rounds.
Black Kite's investors include FirstMark Capital, Volition Capital, Glasswing Ventures, Summit Partners, Data Point Capital, RRE Ventures, Steve Krausz.
# Black Kite: Third-Party Cyber Risk Intelligence Platform
Black Kite is a cybersecurity software company that provides third-party risk management and cyber intelligence solutions for enterprises.[2] The company builds a standards-based intelligence platform that helps organizations identify, monitor, and quantify cyber risk across their vendor ecosystems—addressing a critical gap in how businesses manage supply chain security.[1][2]
The platform serves security and business leaders by moving beyond traditional vendor questionnaires to deliver continuous, evidence-based risk visibility. Black Kite's core offering combines three assessment dimensions: technical cyber ratings based on MITRE standards, financial impact analysis using the Open FAIR model, and automated compliance mapping across 14 global standards.[1][2] This approach enables enterprises to prioritize remediation efforts, communicate risks to stakeholders, and prevent breaches before they cascade through interconnected business networks.
Black Kite was founded in 2016 by Candan Bolukbas, a certified ethical hacker (CEH) who previously worked for NATO uncovering cybercriminal vulnerabilities affecting member countries.[4] Bolukbas's breakthrough insight emerged from his security work: vulnerable third-party contractors often serve as stepping stones to primary targets, making vendor risk a systemic blind spot for most organizations.[4] This realization sparked the creation of a cyber risk rating platform designed to identify and continuously monitor third-party threats at scale—fundamentally reimagining how enterprises approach supply chain security.[4]
The company's founding was informed by real-world cautionary tales, including the Target breach, where a small HVAC vendor became the gateway to a massive data compromise, illustrating how interconnected business networks amplify cyber exposure.[3]
Black Kite operates at the intersection of two critical market forces: the explosive growth of third-party vendor ecosystems and the rising sophistication of supply chain attacks. As organizations increasingly depend on complex networks of contractors, partners, and suppliers, their attack surface has fundamentally expanded beyond their own infrastructure.[3]
The company addresses a market dysfunction: traditional vendor risk management relies on questionnaires sent once or twice annually, creating a false sense of security that doesn't reflect actual cybersecurity maturity or real-time threat conditions.[3] Black Kite's continuous monitoring approach aligns with broader industry shifts toward real-time visibility and automated risk quantification—trends accelerated by regulatory pressure (SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR compliance requirements) and high-profile breaches that have exposed the fragility of interconnected business networks.
By translating technical cyber risk into financial terms, Black Kite also bridges a persistent gap between security teams and business leadership, enabling data-driven risk prioritization and resource allocation across enterprise organizations.
Black Kite is positioned to capture significant market share in the rapidly expanding third-party risk management (TPRM) category, where enterprises are increasingly recognizing that vendor security is inseparable from their own resilience. The company's emphasis on continuous intelligence, financial quantification, and automated compliance mapping addresses pain points that traditional point-in-time assessment tools cannot solve.
Looking ahead, Black Kite's influence will likely grow as regulatory frameworks increasingly mandate supply chain risk visibility and as organizations face mounting pressure to demonstrate nth-party risk awareness (risks introduced by vendors' vendors). The convergence of AI-powered threat detection, real-time monitoring, and business-aligned risk metrics positions the company to become a foundational layer in enterprise security infrastructure—much as vulnerability scanning and SIEM platforms became essential decades ago. The question is not whether third-party risk management becomes table stakes, but how quickly enterprises adopt continuous, intelligence-driven approaches over legacy questionnaire-based methods.
Black Kite has raised $34.0M across 3 funding rounds. Most recently, it raised $22.0M Series B in October 2021.
| Date | Round | Lead Investors | Other Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 1, 2021 | $22.0M Series B | FirstMark Capital, Volition Capital | |
| Oct 1, 2020 | $8.0M Series A | Glasswing Ventures, Summit Partners | |
| Feb 1, 2019 | $4.0M Seed | Data Point Capital, Glasswing Ventures, RRE Ventures, Summit Partners, Steve Krausz |