Vanta lands $40M to automate cybersecurity compliance

Vanta, a security compliance automation startup, today announced that it raised $40 million in an extension of its Series B funding round that closed in June, which valued the company at $1.6 billion. Notably, Crowdstrike invested in the extension — which was led by Craft Ventures — through its Falcon Fund, joined by Sequoia, Y Combinator and unnamed existing investors.

CEO Christina Cacioppo tells TechCrunch that the new cash will be used to support Vanta’s customer acquisition, product R&D and go-to-market efforts. It brings the company’s total capital raised to $203 million.

Cacioppo founded Vanta in 2016 to — in her words — “help companies achieve and maintain a strong security posture.” Previously a professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York, Cacioppo co-founded Nebula Labs, a software development house, before joining Dropbox as a product manager on Dropbox Paper.

“With massive breaches on the rise — like Uber, Sony, Equifax — companies understand that proving their security is a must to doing business. Why? Because enterprises won’t buy a product that is not secure and regulators will crack down on any company with a weak security posture,” Cacioppo told TechCrunch via email. “The problem is emerging companies lack the resources and expertise in-house to properly secure their perimeter, leaving them open to incoming threats and penalties for non-compliance, and they have no way to prove to their customers that their critical business assets are safe from threats.”

Vanta offers services designed to enable businesses to meet regulations, compliance standards and laws, like HIPA and GDPR. The company provides workflows and controls for various apps and services to ensure compliance, allowing auditors to complete audits within Vanta and delivering alerts and guidance via email and apps like Slack.

Vanta recently began offering what it calls “Trust Reports,” which aim to summarize a company’s compliance position.

Behind the scenes, a monitoring engine collects data from Vanta customers’ software-as-a-service app and