Vanta , a trust management platform that automates many of an enterprise's security and compliance processes, today announced it has raised $150 million in a Series C funding round led by Sequoia Capital.
The company is currently valued at $2.45 billion, up from $1.6 billion when it raised a $40 million Series B round in 2022. Earlier this year, Vanta announced that it had surpassed $100 million in ARR for the fiscal year that ended in January.
Image credit: Vanta
Initially, Vanta was focused on helping companies achieve certifications like ISO 27001, HIPAA and SOC 2. Now the company is looking beyond that. Vanta co-founder and CEO Christina Cacioppo said that while Vanta started out focused on automating compliance specifically for startups, it's now moving toward being part of a larger, more holistic conversation about trust.
“Today, Vanta still does a lot of SOC 2, but a lot of what we're building is around how do we help companies build their security programs,” Cacioppo says. “And how do we get the recognition? The compliance piece, the trust center, the real-time security status page, the automated surveys, and so on, but a lot of it is based on this idea: If you can brag about doing good security work and give people the recognition (i.e. revenue) that they deserve, they're going to do even better security work.” […] When we talk about trust, a lot of trust in software, especially B2B software, comes down to, “Am I willing to entrust my customers' data to you?”
Image credit: Vanta
She noted that clients like Omni Hotels, for example, don't necessarily turn to Vanta for help with compliance because they don't actually develop their own software, but they do store a lot of customer data in third-party tools and need help making sure those tools are secure and trustworthy.
As part of its focus on trust, Vanta is also building some of its own security tools, not to compete with companies like CrowdStrike (this was before last week's CrowdStrike disaster) but to help companies prove that claims that, for example, which employees have access to certain sets of data, are technically correct, Cacioppo said.
That often also means integrating into existing security tools. So far, Vanta has built about 200 of these tools in-house, and another 100 or so companies are building their own, according to Cacioppo.
Naturally, the company is also working on AI: Vanta released its first AI product last year, and plans to increase its use of large-scale language models in the future.
For example, the company recently launched a survey automation service. Many companies use security review surveys, for example, when onboarding a new vendor. Filling out these surveys takes an enormous amount of time, in part because the information lives in different systems. So the idea here is to automate all of this by bringing in humans. So far, Vanta's quality metrics show that about 80% of the answers the tool provides are quickly approved by human reviewers. Most of the missing 20% only require minor wording changes.
“The application of the LLM is practical and will save people time. [doing work] “The reality is, no one was willing to do it, at least from a clean slate,” Cacioppo said.
With this new funding, Vanta plans to branch out from its startup roots and move further upmarket (three-quarters of the current YC cohort still use Vanta). The company has more than 8,000 customers in total. But the company also plans to use the new capital to build out its AI products (a common trend among startups these days) and expand its global presence. Vanta currently has 500 employees with a regional focus in North America, the UK, Germany and Australia, with about a quarter of Vanta's customers outside the US.
New investors in the round include Goldman Sachs Alternatives Growth Equity and JPMorgan Chase. Existing investors Atlassian Ventures, Craft Ventures, CrowdStrike Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, Workday Ventures and Y Combinator also participated in the round, bringing the company's total funding to $354 million since its founding in 2018.