Issued on July 28, 2024
Vanta co-founder and CEO Cacioppo spoke to Forbes about steering her company’s growth and putting herself and her company in the spotlight. Ohio native Christina Cacioppo is co-founder and CEO of Vanta, and led the software startup to a valuation of more than $2 billion. She is one of the wealthiest self-made women in America. (Katie Thompson)
Christina Cacioppo founded Vanta, a software startup, on a foundation of Midwestern values like frugality and low self-esteem (think buying coffee in bulk at Costco or not spending a lot on luxury office furniture). Now, the 37-year-old co-founder and CEO of Vanta, the startup that automates enterprise security and compliance processes has raised $150 million in new funding. The Ohio native wants to invest in areas that will help Vanta grow while still staying true to its down-to-earth roots.
“The chairs will change, but we want the coffee to stay the same,” Cacioppo told Forbes. “We don’t want to be so stingy that we’re not being prudent. We want to spend money on things that can grow and grow.”
Vanta’s latest funding round, announced Wednesday, values the company at $2.45 billion, up from $1.6 billion in its previous funding round in 2022. The company raised the funds amid a tougher fundraising environment for late-stage software companies like Vanta that don’t have AI models as their core product. The new round brings the total amount Vanta has raised since 2021 to $353 million. Cacioppo, who appears on Forbes’ list of America’s Richest Self-Made Women, is now worth an estimated $550 million.
Sequoia, which led Vanta’s first institutional funding round in 2021, also led the latest round of funding. New investors Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan participated, along with existing investors Atlassian Ventures, Craft Ventures, Y Combinator and others.
“Vanta is one of the best-performing companies in Silicon Valley,” said Andrew Reed, a partner at Sequoia who sits on Vanta’s board of directors, citing the quality of the product and the leadership of Cacioppo, whom he described as an open-minded leader who does “incredibly thorough research” to develop unique perspectives and make “aggressive decisions.”
Vanta, which is listed on Forbes’ Cloud 100 list of the best private cloud computing companies, generated more than $100 million in annual recurring revenue in the 12 months to January and now has more than 8,000 customers, including Quora, Modern Health and Paris-based AI company Mistral AI. The remote-first company has grown to 500 employees, up from about 340 last year, and is primarily spread across Vanta’s headquarters in San Francisco and offices in New York, Dublin and Sydney.
Earlier this year, about 400 Vanta employees gathered in Nashville for the startup’s first-ever “company kickoff.” (Vanta)
Before Cacioppo and co-founder Eric Goldman, who is no longer with the company, founded Vanta in 2018, security and compliance was primarily done through spreadsheets and screenshots collected in folders to show to accountants and auditors. To save software companies time and money, Vanta’s flagship product automates the security compliance process for companies with continuous monitoring and real-time reporting, centralized in an online hub that Vanta calls the “Trust Center.” After a company is sure it’s secure and compiles all the relevant documentation, auditors can review the data and more easily certify that it complies with a set of industry standards, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA and GDPR. The company has since rolled out similar products for non-software companies that buy software.
Vanta wasn’t actively looking to raise additional capital. The company still has two-thirds of the cash it raised in its 2022 funding round in the bank, about $100 million, according to Vanta Chief Financial Officer David Eckstein.
Cacioppo believes a higher valuation would benefit Vanta’s core business. Vanta’s financial metrics have grown significantly since its last funding round, so “it’s beneficial to update the valuation every few years, especially because a few years ago a lot of valuations weren’t based on fundamentals,” Cacioppo says. “The best investors in the world have vetted us and thought: This helps with recruitment, this helps with customers, and it helps solidify our market leadership.”
With the new funding, Vanta aims to continue expanding internationally, invest in AI, and release new products to a wider range of customers, especially large enterprises. Vanta also plans to use the additional capital to maintain its leading position among growing competitors such as startups Secureframe, Thoropass, and Drata, and to supplant older players such as OneTrust and AuditBoard. (Archival rival Drata has a page dedicated to comparing itself to Vanta, calling it the “One Trick Llama” after Vanta’s purple llama mascot.)
Like many other software companies, Vanta is adding AI capabilities to its products, particularly its Trust Center. New features include Vanta AI, a chatbot released in May that helps address customer questions and security surveys by auto-populating answers based on documents uploaded to the Trust Center. Sanjay Padval, director of product management at Vanta, said the features are built on a combination of existing large-scale language models from OpenAI, Anthropic and others, as well as Vanta’s own technology that helps organize large amounts of data and analyze related bits for similarity, for example.
As Vanta has expanded, it has released new products targeted at customer segments that buy software rather than sell it, like Omni Hotels, which became a customer in late 2023. “A few years ago, we would have said, ‘If you’re a real hotel company, why would you use Vanta?’ ” Cacioppo says. Vanta’s vendor risk management product, released last summer, uses Vanta’s core software to make it faster and easier for companies to validate the security of the software they buy.
With plenty of cash in the bank, fast growth is the focus now, Reed said, adding that Vanta is likely eyeing an initial public offering but declined to say when. (Cacioppo added that Vanta is “not focused on an IPO internally.”)
As Vanta has matured, Cacioppo says two aspects of her role as CEO have changed. First, she no longer feels like the company “sleeps” when she goes to bed at night. Now, when the weekend approaches, if she feels like working on a Vanta problem, she does so. On the other hand, if she doesn’t want to look at a computer screen, she doesn’t. “I give myself space in both situations and know that everything will balance out nicely,” Cacioppo says. She has many other hobbies to keep her busy: She read a book almost a week last year (she just finished Peter Hessler’s “Other Rivers,” about the Chinese education system), speaks seven languages, and climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in 2008.
Against her own inclination to be humble, Cacioppo has become comfortable talking about her own story and Vanta’s, and the “rise of the copycats” has taught her that self-promotion “can actually be useful, sometimes it can help you get people to like what you’re doing and how well you’re doing it.”
This article first appeared on forbes.com and all figures are in U.S. dollars.
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