Protecht Group, an Australian governance, risk and compliance (GRC) software company, announced on April 21, 2026 that it had acquired VISO TRUST, a US-based platform that uses AI to assess the cyber risk posed by a company's suppliers and vendors. Terms were not disclosed.
Protecht plans to combine VISO TRUST's agentic AI capabilities with its existing risk management platform. Co-founders Paul Valente, the chief customer officer, and Russ Sherman, the chief technology officer, are staying with the business in their current roles.
Protecht described the purchase as a major step in its global expansion. It comes a year after the company secured a US$280 million investment from growth investor PSG Equity.
What VISO TRUST built
VISO TRUST automates third-party risk assessments, the security reviews companies run before and after they sign up a new vendor. Its platform is built around collecting and analysing the security documents vendors already have, rather than starting from scratch with each review, and it continuously monitors vendors for changes in risk.
The company says this gives security and risk teams a real-time view of vendor risk and cuts the manual work involved in onboarding suppliers. Customers named at the time of its 2024 funding round included Upwork, Instacart, Notion and Bain Capital.
Valente said in the announcement that companies are expanding their vendor networks while facing more sophisticated cyber threats through those relationships, yet most still manage that risk manually. That gap, he said, is the problem VISO TRUST was built to solve.
“Joining Protecht means we can meet that demand at scale, combining our AI and agent capabilities with a world-class GRC platform, to deliver something genuinely differentiated in the market and for our customers.”
Why Protecht is buying
Protecht sells a GRC platform used for enterprise risk management, audit and regulatory change, categories in which review site G2 has ranked it a leader. The company cited research showing that 83% of enterprises plan to grow their third-party networks over the next three years, but only 18% have fully integrated vendor risk management into their wider risk frameworks. It also cited a forecast that the third-party risk management market will grow 11.5% a year to US$41.7 billion by 2034.
Protecht CEO Jason Phillips said the problem is not only that third-party risk is growing, but that most organisations still handle it with fragmented, manual processes that do not scale. He said VISO TRUST's agentic third-party risk tools complement Protecht's platform and would help customers manage risk across both their own operations and their vendor ecosystems.
Protecht said customers of the combined business would get AI-powered vendor risk assessments to speed up onboarding and due diligence, AI agents that automate GRC workflows, continuous monitoring of third-party and fourth-party risk, and analytics for board-level risk reporting.
The founders and the funding
VISO TRUST raised an $11 million Series A in March 2022 led by Bain Capital Ventures, with Work-Bench, Sierra Ventures and Lytical Ventures participating, according to VC News Daily. Mandiant CEO Kevin Mandia, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz and former Splunk CEO Doug Merritt also invested in that round.
In November 2024 the company announced a further $24 million from its existing backers and new investors Allstate Strategic Ventures, Cisco Investments, EnvisionX Capital and Scale Asia Ventures, Pulse 2.0 reported. Valente was chief executive at the time. Those two rounds add up to $35 million. VISO TRUST did not disclose its headcount or revenue.
A consolidating risk software market
Protecht framed the deal around a familiar pressure on security teams: more suppliers to review, more cyber threats arriving through those suppliers, and no matching increase in staff. It said the combined offering is designed to help customers keep up with third-party and cyber threats without increasing headcount.
Protecht, whose announcement was datelined Sydney, also operates from London. The company did not say whether VISO TRUST would keep its brand or how the products would be packaged for existing customers. With both co-founders staying in their existing roles, Sherman remains in charge of the technology that Protecht now plans to fold into its own platform, and Valente keeps responsibility for VISO TRUST's customers.
