Strike Graph security compliance blog

Strike Graph Wins 2026 Security Compliance Innovation Award

Written by Justin Beals : Founder & CEO | Oct 8, 2026, 3:37:52 PM

Strike Graph has been named winner of the Security Compliance Innovation Award in the 10th annual CyberSecurity Breakthrough Awards. The program, run by independent market intelligence organization CyberSecurity Breakthrough, recognizes the companies and technologies driving progress across global information security.

In its 10th year, the program drew thousands of nominations from organizations in more than 20 countries, from early-stage startups to established global enterprises.

We're proud of the recognition. We're prouder of what it signals: the industry is starting to see compliance as a security assurance problem, not a paperwork problem.

The compliance gap standard GRC tools leave open

Most GRC platforms automate evidence collection and stop there. That leaves teams with a pile of artifacts and no way to know whether any of it actually satisfies the control. The gaps surface later, usually in front of an auditor, as exceptions on the report.

Verify AI, Strike Graph's patent-pending intelligent validation engine, checks whether each piece of evidence actually satisfies its control before an auditor ever sees it. It reviews uploaded documents the way a human internal auditor would: testing each evidence item against its control requirements, flagging deviations, and returning explainable feedback in real time, 24/7.

No more guessing whether a screenshot is good enough. No more evidence gaps discovered mid-audit. No more exceptions you could have fixed months earlier.

For enterprises collecting thousands of evidence items every month, that means every item is validated the day it's uploaded, not months later during audit prep. Customer data shows Verify AI saves $15K to $20K a year in internal audit costs alone and delivers coverage that would otherwise take three times the staff.

Built AI-native from the ground up

Verify AI runs on a platform built AI-native from the ground up, not bolted on. Each capability is designed to remove manual compliance work, not just organize it.

  • AI-enabled integrations. Strike Graph collects the exact evidence needed from hundreds of systems, with AI-guided setup and without adding risk to your environment.
  • Enterprise Workspace Management. Teams share controls, assign tasks, and track progress across multiple locations, frameworks, or products from one central platform.
  • AI Security Assistant. The Security Assistant does the hands-on compliance work. Trained on Strike Graph's multi-framework knowledge base and hosted on our own zero-trust infrastructure, it works only on your organization's data, answering complex compliance questions instantly and completing security questionnaires 90% faster.
  • Compliance Atlas, the advisor. Atlas is Strike Graph’s agentic reasoning engine that reads your compliance data across controls, evidence, and policies to show teams what to fix next. It catches gaps most likely to become audit findings, such as a control requiring 24-hour access deactivation while the policy allows 48 hours. It also flags expired or insufficient evidence and turns open Verify AI failures into assignable fixes.
  • Cross-framework mapping. Strike Graph's graph-based architecture maps controls across 40+ standards, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, CMMC, HIPAA, FedRAMP, and the EU AI Act, so work done once counts everywhere it applies. Adding a new framework reduces redundant work by 60 to 80%.

Underneath all of it is a privacy-first choice. Strike Graph hosts its own AI models rather than sending customer data to third-party services, so your data stays secure and siloed.

Proven in the field

These gains show up in production. Sanmina Corporation used Strike Graph to complete five successful CMMC assessments, organizing more than 600 evidence artifacts per plant.

In November 2025, Strike Graph was one of 33 startups selected for the AWS and Meta "Building with Llama" program, chosen from more than 1,000 applicants. Through the program, Strike Graph's AI team fine-tuned small language models, Meta Llama 3.2 3B and Qwen3 4B, on expert-curated compliance data and deployed them on Amazon Bedrock.

Those models are 17 to 23 times smaller than leading commercial LLMs, and they outperform them on core compliance tasks. Recall on complex control mapping improved by 15.9 percentage points over a leading commercial model, and HIPAA query generation improved by 10.5 points. Costs on concurrent control mapping workloads dropped 97%, and no customer data ever leaves Strike Graph's environment. The full build is documented in a case study on the AWS Builder Center and in Strike Graph's white paper, Small Models, Big Results.

What the judges saw

Steve Johansson, managing director of CyberSecurity Breakthrough, pointed to the same gap that shaped Verify AI:

"Strike Graph treats compliance not as a paperwork problem, but as a security assurance problem. Standard GRC tools automate evidence collection, but stop there, leaving organizations not knowing if the evidence is actually correct. Verify AI understands the complex relationships between systems, controls, and frameworks, scaling seamlessly across teams, products, and departments to test every control and evidence item with precision."

For Strike Graph CEO and founder Justin Beals, the award validates where compliance is headed:

"We believe that automated evidence validation is the future of compliance. Our solution stands as the technical foundation for this, accelerating development of custom compliance AI models that now outperform general-purpose LLMs in both speed and accuracy for compliance-specific tasks. Compliance should be continuous, intelligent, and built for the real teams responsible for it."

Audit-ready year-round

Thank you to CyberSecurity Breakthrough for the recognition, and to all of our customers like Sanmina who use Verify AI in real audits. Since 2020, Strike Graph has helped hundreds of organizations cut compliance timelines by more than 86%.

We'll keep building toward one goal: catching audit findings before they happen, so your team stays audit-ready every day of the year. See how Verify AI validates your evidence.