Concept: US-based SecurityScorecard is a cybersecurity rating and risk-monitoring platform that provides companies with security ratings. The firm has been assisting companies to realize the security risk of its vendors by rating each one with a letter grade based on several dimensions.

Nature of Disruption: SecurityScorecard leverages seven years of historical data to allocate ratings from A to F to assist the security personnel to address their most crucial vulnerabilities and examine external partnerships. This seemingly helps companies understand their cyber posture. Ratings are provided on a category basis, so a company can get an average ‘medium severity’ rating for their patching cadence and DNS Health but a ‘high severity’ grade for their network security. Each company can see its own scorecard for no-cost together with advice on how to improve that score. SecurityScorecard’s platform can also rate a new company that is not in the data set in about five minutes. Its security ratings have been implemented worldwide by many companies including companies from the pharmaceutical, payment processing and insurance verticals. The company’s noteworthy growth has been accelerated by extensive use cases across vendor risk management, self-monitoring, board reporting, cybersecurity insurance underwriting and M&A due diligence.

Outlook: While businesses can invest profoundly to augment their internal defenses, they have less control over companies they do business with. And data breaches caused by third-party compromises have been an emerging problem. With the increasing cases of breaches, cybersecurity ratings can assist organizations to make crucial business decisions. SecurityScorecard has recently commenced its Series E funding round with participation from Silver Lake Waterman, Kayne Anderson Rudnick, and Fitch Ventures, AXA Venture Partners, GV (Google Ventures) and more. The company will use the funds accumulated to hire new talents and expand its growth.

This article was originally published in Verdict.co.uk