Vendict Exits Stealth with $9.5 Million Funding to Power Security Compliance Teams with Generative AI

Vendict, an Israel-based technology startup that leverages the latest advancements in linguistic generative AI to power security compliance teams, emerges from stealth with $9.5 million funding led by Disruptive AI, NFX, and Cardumen Capital. Co-Founded by corporate hi-tech veterans Udi Cohen, CEO, and Michael Keslassy, CTO, the company aims to be a business driver in the Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) landscape by helping technology vendors fulfill their security requirements, and simplify the adoption of new technology.

Technology vendors are assessed by each prospect, via long security questionnaires. Today, those questionnaires are filled out manually. Stewarded under Disruptive AI's guidance, Vendict uses Generative AI to respond to those questionnaires, saving hundreds of working hours each month, shortening the sales process, and generating a competitive advantage.

The World’s First AI that Masters Security Language

Udi and Michael recognized the industry gaps that needed to be addressed. From the get-go, they knew that the existing solutions exclusively focus on workflow optimization, but at the end of the day, organizations still need experts to do the heavy lifting. For that reason, most organizations only allocate a small amount of their security compliance budget to tools.

This is where Vendict comes in. By building the world’s first AI that masters security language, they empower security and GRC teams to reduce risks, save time, gain competitive advantage, and hyper-accelerate sales cycles. Their solution is a combination of a highly focused, professional area of security and vendor assessment with the innovation of AI.

In a nutshell, they provide the AI security expert that today’s solutions lacked. By understanding the meaning of the text, security assessments are shortened from weeks to hours. And with each user interaction, the model gets smarter, and the time-saving is improved.

Fully ahead of their time, Michael and Udi saw the potential of NLP and Generative AI as key technologies to revamp security questionnaires by designing the world’s first AI-driven security compliance. Before these tech breakthroughs happened in the past year, the team behind Vendict already knew that the NLP/AI combination is integral in automating all forms of compliance tasks.

"We recognized that Vendict effectively addresses a genuine issue related to establishing trust among buyers, sellers, and regulators. Their solution innovatively combines their unique AI technology with precise utilization of generative AI techniques." says Gadi Tirosh, Venture Partner, Disruptive AI VC.

“By building the world’s first security language AI model, Verdict helps their customers reduce risks, save time, and accelerate sales cycles,” explained Gigi Levy Weiss, General Partner at NFX. “Udi and Michael have the perfect experience to deliver on this vision and streamline how security compliance is done."

AI Does the Heavy Lifting to Optimize Security Compliance

Vendict tackles questionnaires by drawing from information in an organization’s compliance data: responses to past questionnaires, audit reports (e.g. SOC-2), policies, and procedures. Then, their Generative AI stack provides an accurate and professional response to each question and questionnaire. Moreover, Vendict guides companies in their quest to improve their security compliance posture and enable selling to additional industries and verticals.

With Vendict, buyers can get quick and comprehensive end-to-end vendor analysis based on industry, service criticality, and data sensitivity level. What’s more, buyers can use Vendict to assist with internal risk management, internal audits, and regulation tracking.

"We used to spend hours manually compiling and updating our responses to RFIs and security questionnaires. It was a tedious and error-prone process. But since we started using Vendicts, it's been a game-changer,” said Raul Zayat Galante, Head of Security at Orca Security. “Vendict has a centralized knowledge base for all of our compliance documentation. This makes it easy to find and update the information we need. In addition, Vendict has a plugin for questionnaire filling that helps us automate answers to online RFIs. As a result, we've been able to significantly reduce the time we spend on RFIs and security questionnaire responses. We're also more confident that our responses are accurate and complete. We highly recommend Vendicts to any organization that wants to improve its RFI and security questionnaire response process.”

“Filling out a security questionnaire is one of the least preferred activities of any CISO, GRC specialist, or sales engineer I’ve ever spoken with. By using the GRC-specific generative language model, this is the first time that this pain is truly solved. As the CEO, I’m getting to see the astonished faces of our customers when they realize that they will not need to manually respond to questionnaires anymore. This is satisfying in a way that I can’t explain. But still, this is just an intermediate step. The technology we are now developing will eliminate the need to send questionnaires altogether. Vendict will generate security assessment reports to the buyers, based on the sellers' documents, and the criticality of the vendor,” said Udi Cohen, Co-Founder and CEO of Vendict.

About Vendict

Meet Udi and Michael. Deep Tech Specialists, with a profound understanding of Enterprise workflow, security, and GRC. Vendict’s Co-founders have first-hand experience watching the evolution from the World Wide Web to our current state of cybersecurity risks.

Vendict was founded two years ago on a promise to solve the painful problem of Vendor Risk Management. The vision was to eliminate the pain of screening vendors, allowing continuous monitoring of an organization’s security posture and harnessing the power of generative AI to let data meet data, derive insights, and help make informed decisions.

The round's full list of investors include Disruptive AI , NFX, Cardumen Capital, NewFund Capital, Tuesday Capital, Cyber Club London, Andy Ellis.