Self-made female billionaire secures another $150 million in financing.

The co-founder and CEO of Vanta was interviewed by Forbes, discussing artificial intelligence, acquisition plans, and the long-term goals of this eight-year-old security and compliance enterprise.

Cacioppo didn't always want to be a startup founder. But since she started running a "Beanie Babies" business on eBay alone at the age of 11, she knew she liked creating valuable things. Image source: KATIE THOMPSON

Original title: "Christina Cacioppo's software startup just raised new funds at a $4 billion valuation — even though it didn't need the money."

On July 23, Vanta, a security and compliance software company, announced the completion of a new round of financing of $150 million. The company's valuation rose from $2.45 billion at the time of financing a year ago to $4.15 billion. So far, Vanta's total financing has reached approximately $500 million. Christina Cacioppo, the co-founder and CEO of the company, was included in Forbes' list of America's Self-Made Women. The value of her shares has increased from $550 million to approximately $830 million.

This round of financing was led by the new investor Wellington Management. Existing investment institutions such as Sequoia, Craft Ventures, Y Combinator, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan also participated in this round of financing. According to Matt Witheiler, the head of late-stage growth investing at Wellington, Vanta didn't deliberately seek to raise more funds before, but still successfully completed this financing. The company hasn't used the $150 million it raised a year ago, and most of the funds raised in 2023 remain unused.

Cacioppo, 39, said, "The development of Vanta in the past five years has made me realize that these market opportunities... don't always come around. Part of the reason we chose to accept this financing is that there are so many opportunities right now. As long as we execute properly, we can be in a very favorable position. And this funding can really help us."

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More than a decade ago, Cacioppo and Witheiler first met when they were both working in venture capital in New York. They often met for coffee at the now-closed City Bakery in Manhattan. Witheiler recalled that Cacioppo impressed him as having great strategic vision, being energetic, meticulous in thinking, and "extremely intelligent."

About four years ago, someone suggested that he pay attention to Vanta as a potential investment target, and the two reconnected. After that meeting, he thought there should be an opportunity for them to cooperate. Earlier this year, they had an informal conversation, which led to this round of financing, involving only Wellington and Vanta's early investors. According to Cacioppo and Witheiler, Vanta didn't even prepare formal financing roadshow materials.

Witheiler said, "If you step back and look, you'll find that compliance, security, and regulation have become key drivers in the business world, and this trend is accelerating, and it's the same in the public sector. The regulatory tailwind is not weakening but getting stronger. I think Vanta, with its unique positioning, can well seize this trend in the next decade or even longer."

Cacioppo and co-founder Erik Goldman (who is no longer involved in the company's affairs) founded Vanta in 2018. At that time, the security compliance industry was still in the manual operation stage. Enterprises had to save spreadsheets and screenshots in folders and finally submit them to accountants and auditors for manual review.

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The original intention of founding Vanta was to change this industry, and its goal remains the same: to save customers time and costs by automating the security compliance process of enterprises. Now, this process uses AI to achieve continuous monitoring and real-time reporting (for example, AI can now complete the initial screening of security reviews, but human employees are always involved). After helping enterprises ensure security and organize relevant compliance documents, auditors can review this data more efficiently to determine whether the enterprise meets a series of industry standards such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and GDPR.

In 2024, Vanta was included in Forbes' Cloud 100 list, which ranks non-listed cloud computing companies. Its annual recurring revenue (ARR) has reached approximately $220 million, higher than $100 million in January 2024 and $10 million in 2021.

Vanta has 12,000 customers, including Mistral AI, Omni Hotels, Duolingo, and fintech company Ramp. The company mainly operates remotely, and its employee size is also expanding. It now has more than 1,000 employees, distributed in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Vanta's biggest competitor among startups, Drata, is much smaller. Drata only announced earlier this year that its annual recurring revenue had exceeded $100 million. Witheiler said that in the past 12 to 24 months, the gap between Vanta and its peers has further widened, partly because Vanta can achieve growth with "very efficient" sales and marketing investment.

"Most customers don't care if you pioneered the market — they care if you can provide the best product for them right now," said Cacioppo, who is from Ohio.

03

With this new round of financing, Vanta plans to further expand its cooperation with the government, increase investment in artificial intelligence, and seek more acquisition opportunities.

About two years ago, Vanta began to expand its business to compliance services for government standards, such as the U.S. Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP). Currently, Vanta is participating in a pilot project for this program to help federal agencies more conveniently use cloud-based software products. Now, Vanta already has several public-sector customers handling government data and some private-sector customers with government contracts. Jeremy Epling, Vanta's chief product officer, said that Vanta's goal is to "make it easier for all kinds of enterprises to sell products to the government. For enterprises that already do government business, Vanta will help them easily maintain compliance."

In terms of AI application, Cacioppo emphasized ensuring that this technology truly helps customers solve problems, rather than just "putting an AI veneer on the whole product" as she put it. In June, Vanta launched a fully automated AI agent that can handle the company's security and compliance processes from start to finish with almost no human intervention. Epling said its goal is to achieve "zero-contact security reviews" between buyers and sellers. However, AI technology still has the risk of hallucination (i.e., the model generates incorrect information). Therefore, all AI-generated suggestions or questionnaire answers still need to be manually reviewed. The company stated that it won't use customer data to train the model but will combine existing large language models, high-quality manually annotated data, and synthetic data to optimize AI capabilities. But even without using AI, managing a large amount of customer data itself poses risks: In May, a product vulnerability briefly exposed the data of hundreds of Vanta customers to other customers. (Cacioppo posted on LinkedIn that the problem had been completely solved and said, "We believe it's necessary to publicly disclose the process, cause, and preventive measures we'll take.")

At the beginning of July, Vanta also acquired Israeli startup Riskey, and the transaction amount was not disclosed. This acquisition aims to help Vanta conduct AI-driven continuous risk monitoring (instead of just conducting static evaluations of an enterprise's compliance status at fixed time points). Cacioppo said that Vanta hopes to acquire companies whose products can complement its own to enrich Vanta's existing product portfolio, and this new financing will also enable them to make more acquisitions when they encounter suitable opportunities. Cacioppo pointed out, "Throughout the history of technology, the most durable enterprises often achieve product diversification in the early stage. Usually, a company has a core product or application scenario, but it also develops many useful things around it. This is also our development idea."

Cacioppo said that Vanta's long-term goal is to become a "durable and sustainable company," and most such companies "will eventually become listed companies." This explains why Wellington, which manages $1 trillion and has about 3,000 professionals focused on the public market, led this round of financing. Witheiler pointed out, "Our strategy is to find the next generation of potential listed companies in the private market and nurture them into excellent listed companies through cooperation. From this perspective, all the companies we invest in, including Vanta, are enterprises that we believe will become long-term, stable, and listed companies."

This article is translated from:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/phoebeliu/2025/07/23/christina-cacioppos-startup-vanta-raised-new-funds-at-a-4-billion-valuation-despite-not-needing-the-money/

This article is from the WeChat official account "Forbes" (ID: forbes_china). Author: Phoebe Liu. Translated by Rach. Republished by 36Kr with permission.