Last year, Vanta was valued at $2.45 billion. This week, the company announced a $150 million Series D funding round that pushed its valuation to $4.15 billion: a 69% increase in twelve months. The round, led by Wellington Management with participation from Goldman Sachs, Sequoia, and CrowdStrike Ventures, brings the trust management platform’s total capital raised to more than $500 million since 2021.
Founded in 2018 by Christina Cacioppo, Vanta started by helping startups automate SOC 2 compliance. It now serves over 12,000 customers globally and is positioning itself as an AI-powered infrastructure layer for continuous risk monitoring, policy enforcement, and third-party governance.
From SOC 2 to Continuous Compliance
Vanta’s original proposition was a straightforward automation of the process of getting SOC 2 certified. Startups could move faster, avoid hiring expensive compliance teams, and meet buyer expectations without months of prep. Over time, the company expanded its coverage to over 35 frameworks including GDPR, HIPAA, ISO 27001, and more recently, FedRAMP and CMMC, in a bid to serve defense and government-adjacent clients.
What began as a tool for startups is now pitched as a full-stack trust management platform. Vanta’s technology continuously monitors over 200 million assets and provides real-time visibility into security posture through features like its “Trust Centers,” which allow companies to show live security compliance data to customers and auditors.
The company’s newest product additions lean heavily on AI. The company says its AI Agent automates up to 81% of security review workflows, and can instantly assess policy alignment across systems like AWS. An automated Questionnaire tool drafts over 80% of responses to vendor due diligence requests, with a 95% acceptance rate. Vanta claims this helps customers complete security reviews in half the usual time.
Productization of Trust
Vanta’s growth reflects rising demand for continuous compliance in high-stakes regulatory environments. As companies expand globally and AI infrastructure becomes core to operations, the cost of proving security hygiene in real time has grown. Vanta’s pitch is that trust, like software, should be scalable and automated.
Customers like Ramp and WRITER have integrated Vanta’s tools to eliminate spreadsheets and compress multi-hour audit workflows to under 20 minutes. Atlassian uses the platform to manage compliance across 400+ partners, while Snowflake has embedded Vanta into its own compliance center to speed up customer diligence.
Internally, Vanta’s headcount has surpassed 1,000, with offices in London, Sydney, Dublin, and New York. The company says it has launched over 350 new features in the past year and completed an acquisition of Riskey to deepen its third-party risk capabilities.
Vanta’s use of automation appears aligned with its core value proposition: reducing the manual overhead of proving security and compliance. Cacioppo has said the next stage of development will include AI agents capable of mapping contract commitments to compliance frameworks and remediating security gaps based on natural language prompts.
Vanta was early to the automated compliance space but is no longer alone. Competitors include Secureframe, Drata, and Strike Graph, each targeting slices of the trust and governance market. What distinguishes Vanta at this stage is less its original SOC 2 automation than its full-stack platform ambition and ability to serve large, regulated enterprises. The company’s customer roster spans tech, financial services, healthcare, and increasingly, government.
For now, Vanta is betting that programmable trust, automated, explainable, and verifiable, will become table stakes. Cacioppo highlighted their philosophy in their funding blog post, “We believe trust is the critical ingredient to growth.”
