Irina Denisenko is CEO and co-founder of Knox (Knox Systems), a FedRAMP managed cloud that unlocks the U.S. federal market for modern SaaS companies. She first navigated the FedRAMP gauntlet as co-founder and COO of Class (class.com), where achieving FedRAMP unlocked $20M in additional ARR — most of it commercial, not government. To get there fast, she acquired the 15-year-old managed service provider that ran Adobe's federal applications, then two years later spun it out as Knox alongside her co-founders (the acquired company's CTO and chief architect). Today Knox runs Adobe's federal infrastructure as its anchor tenant plus 50+ customers — including ClickHouse, Sierra AI, Armis, and BigID — holds 16 agency sponsorships across the DoD/DoW, DHS, VA, Treasury, and Commerce, and compresses a traditional three-year, $3M FedRAMP process into 90 days with a 'luxury condo' managed-cloud model.
“If you're a SaaS product, you are going to have to achieve FedRAMP. And indeed, there's less than 500 applications that have it today, because it is so challenging.”
“SOC 2 has about 95 controls, and FedRAMP High, where most folks want to be, has 425. So it is a much bigger, much more involved process.”
“It's my reputation on the line, and frankly it's my job on the line. More likely than not, I'll be sitting in front of a House and Senate subcommittee being grilled on what happened.”
“The one piece of this entire process that you literally are not allowed to throw money at is getting the sponsor, because that's called bribing the government, and that's illegal.”
“For the folks that have FedRAMP, they are operating in basically monopoly conditions.”
“Today, there are two solutions that provide ITSM. One is called ServiceNow and one is called Salesforce that are FedRAMP.”
“AI has really changed the landscape. Something that took 45 days on average from entry to exploit is now down to under a minute, certainly under an hour.”
“What Knox does is we run the luxury condo building on Main Street in that zip code, and our customers move into a floor of that ever-growing skyscraper.”