Congratulations, RiskRecon on Joining Mastercard!

This week, RiskRecon begins the next stage of its journey within Mastercard, completing an acquisition that was first announced over the holidays. It's a graduation day of sorts as we say farewell to our formal involvement with RiskRecon, and are excited to see what lies ahead. The partnership with Mastercard will expand the reach of RiskRecon and undoubtedly spark new applications for the company's risk detection data.

As we reflected on our early meetings with founders Kelly White and Eric Blatte, the sheer ambition of their vision jumps out. For decades, the cybersecurity industry has been floated by the challenge of finding vulnerabilities and breaches on a customer's own devices, systems and networks. Kelly and Eric took this one step further, and instead set out to secure customer data that lives on someone else's (a 3rd-party) network. In particular, the project was deeply authentic to Kelly: a former CISO, who designed a 3rd-party risk initiative, but couldn't find a high-fidelity signal to power the effort—so he started building one himself.

RiskRecon’s story is also one of category creation and in this case, teaching customers how to measure and remediate risks embedded in 3rd party service providers—which is typically harder than the replacement cycle stories we see. And, it was this overlap of ambition and authenticity that gave us confidence that Kelly and Eric were up for the challenge. As RiskRecon’s customer stories made their way through the industry, others soon took notice, like Mastercard.

We’re grateful that Kelly and Eric allowed Accel to play a small role in their success, and will be wishing the entire RiskRecon team the best as they continue to make their customers safer and define the 3rd-party risk category within Mastercard.

—Nate Niparko, and Partners at Accel