Today, we’re announcing @TrustVanta's Series D and new valuation – $4.15 billion – led by @Wellington_Mgmt alongside @sequoia, @ycombinator, @CrowdStrike, @GoldmanSachs, @jpmorgan, @craft_ventures, and @Atlassian. Vanta’s mission is to help businesses earn and prove trust.

We believed – back to the early days – that if we could change the incentives to earn trust by building security programs and prove trust with audits and real-time security status, we could build a more secure internet. We started by automating SOC 2 for startups. Our first product helped startups compete on a level playing field and build trust faster, without drowning in spreadsheets. Before Vanta, “you can’t automate a SOC 2.” Then, all of a sudden, you could.

SOC 2 for builders was the first move, but it wasn’t the end game. As we’d hoped, the world began to move past annual, check-the-box audits. Security conscious buyers now want real signals in real time: they want to see your practices work today, not nine months ago. The bar to demonstrate trust ratcheted up, and we responded by building real-time readiness assessments and then Trust Centers, as well as products for vendor risk, access reviews, and risk management. We aren’t just in it for the SOC 2s; we want to shift security reviews from static, point-in-time checks to continuous, automated verification, facilitating how trust is built and proved.

When we started Vanta in 2018, “automating” a SOC 2 seemed hard, and no one had done it. We thought about building AI to answer security questionnaires instead, but that was impossible to do reliably in a pre-LLM world. Today, Vanta AI drafts over 80% of questionnaire answers, with 95% answer acceptance. It saves customers dozens of hours each week.

I’ve long been a fan of the parable about “the back of the chessboard,” which explains the power of compounding. If Vanta’s taught me anything, it’s to be in awe of compounding. It feels like we’re stacking rice on the chessboard at Vanta: * 200M+ assets continuously monitored —from laptops to servers to employees—for always-on security and compliance *1.5M employees and 33,000 vendors managed to reduce access risk and secure third-party relationships without the review fatigue *1.7B vulnerabilities remediated within SLA, keeping customers ahead of audits and security expectations *10M Trust Center views, each one a potential purchase made faster with automated, self-serve security reviews

Vanta is now critical infrastructure to build and prove business-to-business trust, and we see it in our customers: like @Atlassian, whose 400+ partners showcase trust via compliance milestones and Trust Centers. Or @tryramp, which eliminated spreadsheets by mapping custom controls into continuously-monitored frameworks, saving time and money. @cursor_ai gains real-time visibility into the security posture to maintain compliance confidently as they scale. @Get_Writer completes vendor reviews and access audits in under 20 minutes with Vanta AI. @clay_gtm credits Vanta with saving “hundreds of hours and well over six figures” in potential lost deals or added headcount. The list goes on.

Financing milestones are days of fanfare and posts (please like, share, follow, etc.) and they’re just milestones on a longer journey. For every heaving middle of the chessboard, there are small and unobtrusive beginnings: one grain of rice, two grains of rice, “a brutalist white website," no one notices.

To our customers and partners: thank you. You’ve pushed us to move faster, go deeper, and focus on what matters. Your feedback – good, bad, in between – has helped improve Vanta and make us better. To the Vanta team past and present: thank you for building the future of trust with care, creativity, and grit. Thank you for trusting us with your time and your careers! It remains the privilege of my career to hold a microphone to your work.