Happy Monday.
Ever thought about selling software to the U.S. government?
If you think procurement cycles for normal businesses are slow, the federal government makes buying new software seem like an eternity!
With that in mind, Knox’s offering has a clear value prop: paving a clearer and quicker path for platform providers to sell to the government.
Software vendors that want to sell to the U.S. government must be certified through a process called the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program. Since 2011, the FedRAMP standard has ensured any company working with the government meets a high degree of security requirements. As such, FedRAMP approval has often taken three to five years.
Knox Systems was built to change that process from years to 90 days or less. In practice, this means customers don't have to find or convince a federal agency to sponsor them; it already has that relationship in place across more than a dozen government agencies. Customers deploy their software on major cloud providers like AWS, and Knox handles the security compliance and ongoing monitoring through Knox AI, catching and fixing issues in real time. With that combination, Knox accelerates FedRAMP approval for ~90% lower cost.
Check it out: knoxsystems.com
Knox sells to software vendors looking to expand into government. Generally, these companies are a little more mature or are growing. It charges a baseline $500,000 per software application per year fee. It also charges based on usage, reflecting how much data is secured through FedRAMP, and offers a managed option where Knox can handle deployment, patching, incident response, and support.
Spun out from Class and founded in 2025
In 2024, there were around 350 applications on the FedRAMP marketplace; since Knox Systems’ inception, it has reached around 650
Crossed 100 customers in just one year, roughly 20% of FedRAMP's entire marketplace from over 15 years
Raised $35 million in total funding from Microsoft’s Venture Fund, Ridgeline Partners, Okta Ventures, and MongoDB Ventures while generating double that in ARR
Irina Denisenko, CEO and co-founder of Knox, was previously the co-founder and COO of Class, an education tech company that is building a virtual classroom/learning environment. As Class was exploring selling to the government, specifically the Air Force, Denisenko was told that the timeline would be roughly five years: a few years to get FedRAMP certified and then another few years to onboard and adopt Class. To expedite this process, she had to acquire a company called Connect Solutions, which had both the expertise in getting FedRAMP certified and the technical infrastructure to do it quicker.
Immediately, she had three thoughts. First, that’s an unnecessarily slow timeline. Second, technology moves too fast to have government agencies moving at a snail's pace. Third, you shouldn’t have to acquire another company just to get the right expertise and personnel to get FedRAMP certified.
Class managed Adobe’s FedRAMP environment for over a decade. So, in 2025, Knox Systems was spun out with Adobe and Class serving as its first customers.
Denisenko co-founded Knox with Chris Johnson, who serves as the CTO and has more than two decades of experience in cloud infrastructure and compliance. Prior to Knox, he was leading cloud operations and large-scale FedRAMP deployments for federal agencies at a company called CoSo Cloud.
With a clear pain point identified, a big initial customer in Adobe, and years of domain expertise, the team moved fast, and it showed: Knox Systems crossed 100 customers in just over a year.
Knox Systems’ mission is to unlock great technology for the U.S. government. In an ideal world, the government accesses the best and most cutting-edge technology securely, while software providers, whether startups or established companies, can open stable and reliable lines of business with the government.
But we don’t live in an ideal world.
It’s no secret that federal agencies are often slower to adopt technology. That means tech companies selling into government face longer sales cycles and more resistance before they can close a deal. Unlike most startups, vendors trying to sell to the government don't have the luxury of trial and error and cannot afford to break things (in this case, having any security compromise or bug in infrastructure). On paper, that is a serious challenge for any company hoping to make the government a customer.
But, there’s a trend working in their favor.
With the AI boom, the U.S. government is ramping up spending on innovative technology. Recently, it announced that over $400 million is being put toward a new national network of AI-programmable cloud laboratories. In practice, the heavy red tape and challenges that go hand in hand with government authorizations are now not as debilitating as they used to be. And so, with this environment making selling to the government favorable for more tech companies, Knox's expertise comes into play, and has certainly contributed to its rapid growth.
Knox has very strong momentum as it continues its hypergrowth phase, as described by Denisenko. Earlier, we outlined figures around its revenue and number of customers: Denisenko mentioned that the company is currently trying to cross $100 million in ARR and is on track to do so sooner rather than later. We asked her how Knox will “move fast but also not break things.” Her answer? It's investing heavily into agents.
Knox helps software companies get authorized to sell to the U.S. government in 90 days or less, using AI-driven compliance tools and existing federal relationships.
That’s why she’s building out Knox AI, a continuous monitoring and remediation platform. It combines in-house tools with other reliable and FedRAMP-approved-tools like CrowdStrike. The goal is to ensure that Knox is providing a 24/7 intelligent agent to investigate and remediate incidents in real time, as well as delivering continuous monitoring and support. With the team at Knox already having years of FedRAMP experience, they know what existing software and processes are good and what will slow them down, and they’ve been able to combine that to leverage AI-native and FedRAMP-certified agents.
As security threats become more sophisticated and agentic in nature, Knox is making sure that compliance and monitoring stay one step ahead of the curve by investing in agentic infrastructure. Moreover, in the government space where relationships are essential, it is not only well-connected but already authorized by several federal agencies. That includes the National Institutes of Health, IRS, and Patent and Trademark Office, to name a few.
In just over a year, Knox has achieved considerable momentum in reducing the FedRAMP timeline and grown both revenue and adoption from customers and government agencies. Besides, Knox has been able to demonstrate that the path to get FedRAMP approval can be different and less torturous. And it's not done yet, given the company is entering a domain where demand is significant and continuing to grow from $2.6 billion to $9.3 billion over a decade with 18% compounding growth.
We are curious to see how Knox builds on this incredible start.
