Knox, a startup aiming to simplify the arduous FedRAMP certification process for SaaS vendors, has raised $6.5 million in a seed round led by Felicis, with participation from Ridgeline and FirsthandVC.
The federal managed cloud provider, founded by Irina Denisenko in 2024, offers a compliance platform designed to cut down FedRAMP approval time from years to just three months — and at significantly lower costs.
Solving a costly federal hurdle
Achieving FedRAMP, a requirement for selling software to U.S. government agencies, typically takes up to three years and can cost more than $3 million. Denisenko, previously COO at Class.com, experienced these challenges firsthand and used the acquisition of CoSo Cloud to fast-track her former company’s certification. That experience laid the foundation for Knox’s mission: enabling other startups to access federal contracts more easily.
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Competing with giants
Knox’s main competitor is Palantir, which launched a similar service called FedStart in 2023. But Denisenko sees this as validation. “Even Anthropic couldn’t figure this out on their own,” she told TechCrunch, noting that Knox’s automated platform continuously tests and audits client infrastructure for compliance issues, offering remediation or alerts.
The startup already supports clients like Adobe, Spacelift, and a language model provider — and plans to scale to over a dozen live cloud customers by year-end.
“This stuff is legitimately very hard and very risky,” said Denisenko. “We will bear the risk.”
With growing concerns about AI and cybersecurity at the federal level, Knox is positioning itself as a vital compliance engine for the next wave of government tech vendors.
