Cybersecurity rating provider Black Kite today announced a $22 million Series B funding round led by Volition Capital. The investment will boost Black Kite's efforts to scale its supply-chain cybersecurity monitoring services including the Ransomware Susceptibility Index that fueled the vendor’s rapid growth. 

“We've made a move to help companies look at their entire supply chain, vendors, contractors, everything at scale,” Black Kite CEO Paul Paget said. “Everybody's monitoring their own security, but nobody's monitoring the whole ecosystem.”

He warned that cyber-adversaries have figured out how to breach companies through their supply chains and partners. Because of this, Black Kite aims to help customers monitor the whole network to reduce their exposure. 

“Why bother doing the top 100 if you have 1,000,” supply-chain vendors, Paget argued. “You should do it all. And I think we're the first ones that can do that. If we can establish that over the next year, then going into 2023-24, we will be the leader in the market.”

Black Kite has raised more than $33.1 million in venture capital funding since 2019. And it doubled its employee headcount and customer base over the past year. 

The vendor plans to continue investing in marketing, channels, strategic partnerships, and cyber risk management innovations including its ransomware predictability tool.

Black Kite revealed its Ransomware Susceptibility Index in April, and the tool inspects, analyzes, and models data collected from various open-source intelligence sources. It also leverages machine learning to calculate ransomware susceptibility scores. The scale ranges from zero (lowest likelihood of ransomware attack) to one, according to Black Kite. 

“If you're over 0.7, you're in the red zone, you are going to almost certainly get hit with ransomware in the next six to 12 months,” Paget said.

To prove that ransomware is predictable, Black Kite also started tracking its index against companies hit by ransomware attacks. “If we're tracking them we can prove it. If not, we add them in right away,” he explained, adding that the index also tracks all the third-party breaches to build up its intelligence.

Black Kite’s index and other cyber risk assessments are based on its data lake, which stores data from more than 34 million entities. “If you have a digital presence, we have you in the database,” Paget said. 

Black Kite recently converted the index from beta testing to production release, and Paget already saw orders gain steam.  

“Our growth is going up every quarter faster than it was the previous quarter,” he said. “That's why we raised some money, to help us get the staffing in place so that we can handle the growth.”