Knox raises $6.5M to slash FedRAMP certification from years to months
Knox, a federal managed cloud provider, just secured $6.5 million in seed funding led by Felicis to speed up FedRAMP compliance for SaaS vendors.
FedRAMP certification for government software contracts is costly and slow—taking up to three years and $3 million. Knox claims it can cut that down to just three months and a fraction of the cost. 
CEO Irina Denisenko launched Knox last year after firsthand frustration trying to get FedRAMP at Class, the education startup where she was COO. Instead of waiting three years for clearance, Class bought CoSo Cloud, a FedRAMP-certified company. That got them certified in six months.
“Class would still be getting FedRAMP today” if it tried on its own, Denisenko said.
Knox’s platform connects directly to customer codebases. It runs continuous tests and audits against FedRAMP standards, fixing issues or flagging them for customers. It also tracks policy compliance like personnel training.
The startup is already working with Adobe, Class, Spacelift, and an LLM provider. Denisenko expects “well north of a dozen customers live” this year.
The only major competitor is Palantir’s FedStart, which launched two years ago and serves big clients like Anthropic. Knox sees Palantir’s success as proof of the growing need.
“Even anthropic couldn’t figure this out on their own,” Denisenko said.
“We will bear the risk.”
With government software contracts growing, Knox wants to make FedRAMP certification easier and cheaper for mid-size SaaS firms locked out by current barriers.
