Trustero, an innovator in Compliance as a Service for emerging enterprises, has exited stealth mode and has raised $8 million in seed funding. Zetta Venture Partners led the round with participation from Engineering Capital and Vertex Ventures.
The past two years have seen a rapid shift to remote and hybrid offices. Unfortunately, the statistics show that hackers welcomed that shift and took advantage of businesses’ vulnerabilities and gaps in security. While many large businesses suffered breaches, small and medium businesses were easier targets for hackers because of their lack of resources and security expertise.
SOC 2 compliance can help companies develop and maintain robust defenses against cyber threats and significantly increase trustworthiness. However, committing to SOC 2 compliance requires clearly defined, consistently enforced internal controls, policies, and procedures, as well as regular, independently conducted audits. Trustero Compliance as a Service streamlines the audit process, bridges the communication gap with auditors, and helps businesses discover their source of truth with intelligent controls and policies mapped to a specific security framework. As a result, 100s of hours are saved by automating hundreds of tasks, easing, and speeding the path toward credible, sustainable compliance and trustworthiness.
“As software industry veterans and entrepreneurs recognized for both innovation and expertise, we understand the challenges fast-growing companies face, including the investment in time and effort needed to maintain strong security and compliance postures,” said Phillip Liu, CEO, and founder of Trustero. “Trustero is designed and built to help businesses create trust amongst their customer and partner ecosystem.”
Trustero includes pre-packaged intelligent controls mapped to SOC 2 Trust Services. Trustero automatically checks controls and evidence for compliance and sends alerts if any become non-compliant. Unlike any other platform, Trustero uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to provide remediation suggestions on fixing the problem. In addition, Trustero can pinpoint what other companies have presented to auditors that enabled them to meet compliance.
“Zetta supports startups solving business problems with AI,” said Jocelyn Goldfein, managing director at Zetta Venture Partners. “Trustero is pioneering the use of modern NLP and other ML techniques to automate audit preparation and compliance, addressing immediate pain points for both tech companies and auditors. Long term, Trustero can build the platform for enterprise trust in foundations of data and models.”
For companies with few or no formal policies in place, Trustero includes access to a library of pre-packaged, auditor-vetted policies as well as customizable policy templates. These features significantly reduce the time to become “audit-ready.” In addition, where SOC-compliant controls and policies are in place, Trustero can easily import them and map them to the compliance framework.
“Compliance with proven best practices such as SOC 2 is both increasingly critical and daunting for many organizations,” said In Sik Rhee, General Partner at Vertex Ventures. “Trustero’s Compliance as a Service offering can help make it easier and faster to achieve and sustain compliance than more traditional approaches.”
Trustero also automates evidence discovery, mapping, and validity testing with integrations to the most popular SaaS applications. In addition, AI-supported control evidence suggestions and test observations from cohort SOC 2 reports reduce time to achieve audit readiness.
“As an early investor in Phil Liu’s previous startup, SignalFx, I’ve had the privilege of watching him build a billion-dollar company from scratch. I am honored he has again chosen me to be his investor,” said Ashmeet Sidana, founder and chief engineer at Engineering Capital. “Phil’s experience and CTO Bo Adler’s technical insights is the perfect combination to help emerging enterprises achieve and sustain compliance credibly and efficiently.”
The Trustero solution is built and supported by a team of technology industry veterans. CEO Philip Liu has previously served as Chief Architect Server Automation and Distinguished Technologist at HP Software, a Software Architect at Facebook, and Founder, CTO, and Board of Directors member at SignalFx, among other distinguished positions. CTO Bo Adler holds a Ph.D. in computer science that he completed while working at Facebook and is co-inventor on more than 20 patents.
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