Concourse Labs emerges from stealth with $15.2 million to automate cloud compliance

Concourse Labs, a startup developing an automated cloud governance platform, today emerged from stealth with $15.2 million in financing. The proceeds will be put toward accelerating Concourse’s sales and marketing efforts, scaling operations, and broadening and bolstering product development, a spokesperson said.

It costs between $7.7 million and $30.9 million for companies to meet or maintain regulatory compliance, according to the Ponemon Institute, and non-compliance expenses can spike at up to 2 times that range. By law, organizations that share, collect, or store personal data must abide by frameworks such as GDPR, HIPAA, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), and the California Consumer Privacy Act, all of which mandate specific and sometimes arduous practices.

Concourse’s platform aims to automate the compliance process with an immutable system of record for companies’ policy, identity, and cloud usage histories that’s used to generate baselines and predictions (as well as views) for normal activity. The system detects patterns of behavior and usage considered to be anomalous and delivers reports to cloud security analysts, helping them to spot risks they might otherwise miss.

Concourse taps code to validate that apps comply with policies and controls, both when they’re being built and continuously during runtime. It integrates with existing CI/CD toolchains and, in the event of a problem, identifies the key problem areas developers need to remediate. A complimentary dashboard provides an up-to-date understanding of risk posture.

Concourse claims to cover a wide and expanding range of cloud platforms and technologies including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, Kubernetes, microservices, and serverless computing such as Lambda. On the app side, it supports programs written using infrastructure-as-a-service or platform-as-a-service solutions.

The enterprise governance, risk, and compliance market is anticipated to be worth $88.48 million by 2027, according to Grand View Research. Beyond Concourse, San Francisco-based TrustArc recently raised a $70 million round of funding to help companies implement privacy and compliance programs. Privitar nabbed $40 million to better enable businesses to engineer privacy protection into their various data projects. InCountry exited stealth in 2019 with $7 million in seed funding to help multinationals comply with local data residency regulations, while in 2018 BigID nabbed $30 million to expand its data privacy management platform for enterprises. More recently, LogicGate and Securiti.ai, which provide platforms that automate processes and compliance tracking, raised tens of millions to invest in content, frameworks, data partnerships, and integration.

New York-based Concourse, whose series A funding round was led by ForgePoint Capital with participation from 83North and Capri Ventures, counts among its leadership former executives at Goldman Sachs, Red Hat, Google, AWS, and Rackspace. As a part of the investment, ForgePoint’s managing director Don Dixon and cofounder William Lin and 83North partner Yoram Snir will join the startup’s board of directors.

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