Vanta funding: Every round, investor, and valuation (2026)

Vanta sells software that automates security compliance. It connects to a company's cloud accounts, code repositories, and HR systems, checks them against standards such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, and HIPAA, and collects the evidence an auditor asks for. Customers then use it to answer the security questionnaires that buyers send before signing a software contract.

Vanta has raised about $504 million across seven funding events since 2018, all of it equity. Its latest round, a $150 million Series D led by Wellington Management in July 2025, valued the San Francisco company at $4.15 billion.

The unusual part is the order of events. Vanta reached more than $10 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) on almost no outside money, and only then raised from Sequoia. Let's dive into Vanta's funding history.

Vanta's funding falls into three stages: a bootstrapped start, a burst of rounds in 2021 and 2022 that made it a unicorn, and two growth rounds a year apart that brought in banks and asset managers.

Christina Cacioppo and Erik Goldman founded Vanta in 2018 and went through Y Combinator that winter. Both came from Dropbox, where Cacioppo had been a founding product manager on Dropbox Paper and Goldman a software engineer. Cacioppo had earlier worked in venture capital.

The first product did one thing: it got startups ready for a SOC 2 audit, the security report that enterprise buyers ask software vendors to show. Vanta signed up its first 600 or so customers without a website, and it was profitable from 2019 through 2021.

The seed money is the least documented part of the history. Forbes reported $500,000 from Y Combinator plus a $3 million seed round, which matches TechCrunch's count of total funding after the 2022 rounds. Vanta never announced the seed, and funding databases disagree on who led it.

The first institutional round arrived in May 2021, when Sequoia partner Andrew Reed led the Series A. By then Vanta had more than 1,000 customers and more than $10 million in ARR.

Sequoia had an inside view: nearly two dozen of its own portfolio companies already used Vanta. The firm also knew the founders' former employer well, having been Dropbox's dominant early backer.

Thirteen months later, Craft Ventures led the Series B that made Vanta a unicorn. Vanta had more than 3,000 customers and 250 employees, and the announcement pointed to its burn rate and gross margins rather than growth alone. In October 2022, CrowdStrike and a group of individuals extended the round at the same price.

In May 2023, the venture arms of Atlassian, HubSpot, and Workday invested undisclosed amounts. Each came with a partnership attached, and CrowdStrike deepened its own through a new integration with its Falcon security platform.

Vanta waited two years for its next priced round. In July 2024, Sequoia returned to lead the Series C, and the growth equity arm of Goldman Sachs Alternatives and J.P. Morgan joined for the first time. Vanta had crossed $100 million in ARR that January and had more than 8,000 customers.

The Series D followed a year later, led by the Boston asset manager Wellington Management. Cacioppo told CNBC that Vanta had not yet spent any of the Series C money. She told Forbes it took the new round anyway because the market opening looked too good to waste.

Vanta has raised nothing since July 2025, and no tender offer or debt facility has been reported.

Vanta's valuation rose about eightfold in four years. The biggest jump came early, when the Series B tripled the Series A price, and the later rounds rose more slowly.

The Series C came in only about 1.5 times above the 2022 price, even though ARR had grown roughly tenfold since the Series A. The gap tracks the fall in software valuations during 2022 and 2023, when late-stage prices dropped across the industry.

The Series D price was about 1.7 times the Series C. Forbes estimated Vanta's ARR at about $220 million at the time, so investors paid close to 19 times revenue. With ARR at $300 million by April 2026, the same price now works out to about 14 times.

AI startups reach that size far faster today. Decagon passed $4 billion within two years of its first announced funding round, while Vanta took seven years to get to a similar number.

Vanta has not published its cap table. Forbes valued Cacioppo's stake at about $830 million after the Series D.

Vanta's cap table has three layers: the venture firms that backed it as a startup, the banks and asset managers that arrived for the growth rounds, and software companies whose products Vanta plugs into.

Sequoia led the Series A and Series C, joined the Series B, and came back for the Series D. Andrew Reed, the partner behind the investment, said in 2024 that Vanta had grown into "a special and enduring company" under Cacioppo.

Sequoia's bet started with its own portfolio. Vanta was already the default SOC 2 tool for many of its startups, and Sacra describes it as the standard choice for about three quarters of Y Combinator companies.

Craft Ventures, the San Francisco firm co-founded by David Sacks, led the Series B through its growth fund. It returned for the Series C and Series D.

The 2024 and 2025 rounds brought in investors that usually appear close to an IPO. Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives and J.P. Morgan entered in the Series C and came back for the Series D.

Wellington Management led the Series D as a new investor. Its investing team told Forbes that its strategy is to find future public companies in the private market and help them become great public companies, and that it sees Vanta as one.

CrowdStrike was the first strategic backer, investing in the 2022 extension and later through CrowdStrike Ventures. Its Falcon platform feeds endpoint data into Vanta, and the investment gives the security company, whose public ownership is led by index funds, a partner selling to the same buyers.

Atlassian Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, and Workday Ventures joined in 2023. All three companies sell software that Vanta's customers must audit, and Atlassian is a Vanta customer too. Two of the parents are still run the way Vanta is, with founders in charge, through Atlassian's co-founder control and Workday's dual-class voting setup.

Y Combinator has backed Vanta since the 2018 batch and joined the Series A, Series B, Series C, and Series D. Its startups are also one of Vanta's steadiest sources of new customers.

Vanta spends its funding on new products, acquisitions, and expansion outside the US. Because it was profitable before it raised, the money has paid for reach rather than survival.

The first rounds paid for more frameworks. Vanta added ISO 27001 and HIPAA in 2021 and now supports more than 35, including GDPR, FedRAMP, and ISO 42001, the new standard for AI management systems.

Later rounds paid for products around the audit itself. Trust Center lets customers publish their security posture, and Questionnaire Automation drafts answers to buyers' security reviews. The Series D was earmarked for Vendor Risk Management, which helps companies vet their own suppliers instead of tracking them in a simple vendor list spreadsheet.

Vanta began adding AI features in 2023, and they now sit at the center of the product. In November 2025, Vanta launched what it calls its Agentic Trust Platform, built on Vanta AI Agent 2.0, which collects audit evidence, flags gaps between written policies and real system settings, and monitors vendors.

The models come from OpenAI and Anthropic, among others, and Vanta says it does not train them on customer data. Its own reports show where demand is coming from: 70% of companies use AI tools that security teams never approved.

Vanta has bought two companies and disclosed terms for neither. Trustpage, bought in January 2023, automated security reviews between vendors and customers and became part of Trust Center.

Riskey, bought in July 2025, monitors third parties for breaches, leaked credentials, and misconfigurations. Its technology now runs inside Vendor Risk Management. Cacioppo told Forbes after the Series D that Vanta was looking for more deals.

Vanta has about 1,000 employees across the US, the UK, Ireland, and Australia. The 2024 round paid for a deeper push into the UK and Australia, where Vanta said it was growing faster than in North America.

Vanta makes its money from annual subscriptions, priced by tier and by the number of frameworks and questionnaires a customer needs. More products per customer is the plan: ARR per customer rose from about $17,000 to about $19,000 between July 2025 and April 2026, according to Sacra estimates.

Vanta is pushing upmarket and into government. The Series D was earmarked for FedRAMP, NIST 800-53, and CMMC support, which help companies sell to US federal agencies and defense contractors. Its customers already include Snowflake, Atlassian, Samsara, and Cursor, plus 60% of the Forbes AI 50.

Growth has sped up as companies race to vet AI tools. ARR went from $200 million to $300 million in nine months and has roughly tripled in two years, while the customer count reached 16,000 by April 2026. In June 2026, Vanta hired John McCauley as chief financial officer, who previously led IPO preparation at Seismic and worked at ServiceNow through its listing.

Cacioppo has not given an IPO date and says the focus is on building a long-term company. The main risk is competition. Drata bought the trust center startup SafeBase for $250 million in 2025, and cheaper AI-written code tempts large customers to build their own compliance tools, a threat Vanta has argued against on its own blog. Vanta also competes for investor attention with AI companies, which took about half of all venture funding raised by startups in 2025.

Vanta has raised about $504 million across seven funding events since 2018. That includes about $3.5 million from Y Combinator and seed investors, a $50 million Series A, a $110 million Series B, a $40 million extension, a $150 million Series C, and a $150 million Series D. Its 2023 strategic investments were undisclosed, and it has reported no debt.

Vanta's lead investors are Sequoia, Craft Ventures, and Wellington Management. Other backers include Goldman Sachs Alternatives, J.P. Morgan, Y Combinator, CrowdStrike Ventures, Atlassian Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, and Workday Ventures.

Vanta was valued at $4.15 billion after its $150 million Series D in July 2025. No new round or tender offer has been announced since.

No. Vanta is private and has not filed for an IPO. In June 2026, it hired a chief financial officer with IPO experience, but CEO Christina Cacioppo has not given a timeline.

Vanta is owned by its founders, employees, and investors. Forbes valued the stake of co-founder and CEO Christina Cacioppo at about $830 million at the Series D price. The largest outside holders are likely Sequoia, Craft Ventures, and the Series C and Series D investors, though exact stakes are not public.