Compliance is the floor. Your threat model is the target.

Trellis works with startups from seed through Series D, from 5 people to more than 500, in any industry. Some have no security function yet. Others have a team but no executive leading it. Either way, nobody owns the answer to who would attack the company, how, or what they’d take.

Trellis has particular depth with AI-native companies, whose agents and model pipelines open attack paths most security programs don’t account for. The practice doesn’t stop there: Trellis also supports nonprofits and defense suppliers preparing for CMMC.

Trellis will get you to SOC 2, CMMC, or whatever certification your customers require. Then it keeps going until your security answers your actual threat model.

For example, a company that holds customer financial records needs to know who can export them and whether anyone would notice, whether or not any auditor asks.

A certification shows a customer that you have controls; the program underneath it determines whether an attacker gets in.

Trellis opens the AWS console, audits who holds GitHub admin rights, and locks down the Google Workspace tenant, then writes policy that describes the controls now in place.

Trellis turns that work into tools: scanners, skills, and MCP servers that run against your code, cloud infrastructure, and SaaS configuration. The assessment runs again every quarter, so the findings stay current instead of going stale in a PDF.

Every engagement starts with read-only access that your team can revoke at any time. When a fix requires a change, Trellis delivers it as a pull request or configuration change that your engineers review and approve through your standard process. Trellis never holds standing administrator access.

Most clients start with a two-week assessment, move to a monthly retainer, and add fixed-price projects when a specific gap needs closing before a customer deal, an audit or a funding round.

Clients usually come to Trellis for one of three reasons:

• 01You need SOC 2, ISO 27001 or another framework in place before a customer, auditor or investor asks for it.
• 02You don’t know how mature your security is, or where an attacker would get in.
• 03You want enterprise-grade security leadership, but you don’t need a full-time CISO.

Trellis is the wrong fit for a company that wants check-box compliance.