ai-native-compliance
(3)
Justin Beals Turned the Worst Part of Enterprise Sales Into a Company
A theater graduate, programmer and repeat founder, Justin Beals built Strike Graph around a lesson learned the expensive way: when trust arrives late, deals die early.
Knox Systems, Inc.
Knox Systems is an Austin, Texas company that operates a pre-authorized, AI-managed federal cloud so that commercial SaaS vendors can reach FedRAMP authorization in roughly 90 days for about 90% less than the traditional cost. By running a shared, continuously monitored compliance boundary across AWS, Azure, and GCP, Knox lets customer applications inherit 60-80% of required security controls on day one, then automates evidence collection, documentation, and remediation. Founded in 2023 by Irina Denisenko, the company raised a $25M Series A in March 2026 and serves vendors such as Adobe, Celonis, OutSystems, Armis, and BigID across 15+ federal agency authorizations.
Irina Denisenko
Irina Denisenko is the co-founder and CEO of Knox Systems, an Austin-based cybersecurity company that delivers 'FedRAMP as a Service' to help commercial software vendors get authorized to sell to the U.S. government in roughly 90 days instead of years. She started Knox in 2023 after living through the FedRAMP bottleneck herself as COO of Class Technologies, where she scaled the company to $50M in ARR. A repeat operator who also helped build drone company PrecisionHawk, Denisenko positions Knox as a challenger to Palantir's FedStart, backed by Felicis Ventures and roughly $31.5M in total funding.