INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Mastercard announced today that it is acquiring RiskRecon, a Salt Lake City startup that uses publicly available data to build security
assessments of organizations
The companies did not share the purchase price.
It has become increasingly important for financial services companies like Mastercard to
help customers navigate cybersecurity, and RiskRecon will give customers an objective score of a company risk profile.
&Through a powerful
combination of AI and data-driven advanced technology, RiskRecon offers an exciting opportunity to complement our existing strategy and
technology to secure the cyber space,& Ajay Bhalla, president of cyber and intelligence for Mastercard, said in a statement.
RiskRecon CEO
Kelly White told TechCrunch in a 2016 interview after the company $3 million seed round that the company looks at information that is
readily available on the internet and puts it together to measure a company overall security risk:
RiskRecon leverages information that is
available on the web from companies operating there as part of the act of doing business
&If you stand up web servers and DNS servers, these are intentionally discoverable because they are providing services on the internet
Systems reveal the software being run and version information from which you can determine security performance.&
White sees joining
Mastercard as an opportunity to be a part of a larger organization and all that that entails
&By becoming part of their team, we have an opportunity to scale our solution and help companies in new industries and geographies take
steps to better manage their cybersecurity risk,& he said in a statement.
RiskRecon launched in 2015 and has raised $40 million, according
Investors included Accel, Dell Technologies Capital, General Catalyst and F-Prime Capital.
It worth noting that the company was not alone in
the space, competing with New York City-based SecurityScoreCard, which launched in 2013 and has raised over $112 million, according to
The last investment came in June for $50 million.
Today deal is subject to standard regulatory approval, but is expected to close in the
first quarter in 2020.
RiskRecon scores $3 million seed round to provide objective cloud vendor security assessments
