Vanta
Founders
Christina Cacioppo, Erik Goldman · Founded 2018 · HQ today: San Francisco, California, United States
Vanta was founded by Christina Cacioppo, Erik Goldman in 2018. It is now led by Christina Cacioppo.
Christina Cacioppo worked at Union Square Ventures and then as a product manager at Dropbox. She started Vanta in 2018 with Erik Goldman, a former Dropbox colleague, and the company went through Y Combinator's Winter 2018 batch. The pair focused on SOC 2 because startups selling to larger companies were repeatedly asked for it and found the manual process slow. Vanta raised little outside money at first; its first institutional round was a $50 million Series A led by Sequoia Capital in 2021. Craft Ventures led a $110 million Series B at a $1.6 billion valuation in June 2022, Sequoia led a $150 million Series C at $2.45 billion in July 2024, and Wellington Management led a $150 million Series D at $4.15 billion in July 2025.
| Founder | Role at founding | Contribution |
|---|---|---|
| Christina Cacioppo | Co-founder & CEO | — |
| Erik Goldman | Co-founder | — |
Worked at Union Square Ventures and as a product manager at Dropbox before founding Vanta; studied at Stanford University.
Christina Cacioppo co-founded Vanta in 2018 with Erik Goldman, a former Dropbox colleague, and has been CEO since. The company went through Y Combinator's Winter 2018 batch and began by automating SOC 2 evidence collection. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).
Software engineer and tech entrepreneur.
Erik Goldman co-founded Vanta in 2018 alongside Christina Cacioppo. As the absolute critical technical architect, he built the incredibly complex early backend integrations capable of automatically pulling security data from AWS and GitHub, essentially inventing the automated compliance software category before leaving the company in 2021. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).
Christina Cacioppo
Co-founder & CEO
As Co-Founder and CEO, she is universally recognized as the visionary who completely created the 'automated compliance' software category, driving Vanta to a massive unicorn valuation.
Vanta was founded in early 2018 by Christina Cacioppo and Erik Goldman, former colleagues at Dropbox who combined product strategy with cloud engineering expertise.
Erik Goldman served as a software engineer at Dropbox, where he worked on backend cloud systems; at Vanta, he helped architect the initial continuous API polling infrastructure that connected cloud accounts to compliance rules.
The founders met while working at Dropbox headquarters in San Francisco, collaborating on developer productivity and product tools before leaving together to launch an entrepreneurial venture.
Before focusing on compliance, the founders experimented with several ideas—including an internal knowledge-sharing tool and a service to track employee software usage—before realizing that security compliance was the acute, hair-on-fire problem startups faced.
In YC W18, Cacioppo realized that dozens of batchmates were losing enterprise deals because enterprise buyers demanded SOC 2 reports; Vanta automated their audit prep, securing instant product-market fit.
The founders spent hundreds of hours meeting with skeptical CPA audit partners, demonstrating that API-generated JSON logs and cryptographic hashes from AWS were far more reliable and tamper-proof than manual screenshots.
Christina Cacioppo led customer discovery, sales, pricing, and product roadmap, while Erik Goldman focused on building the backend engineering integrations and secure data ingestion pipelines.
Because Vanta was cash-flow positive from early customer prepayments, the founders prioritized refining product reliability and building deep auditor relationships over premature hiring and hyper-dilutive fundraising.
After helping build the foundational technical architecture and scaling the engineering team through Vanta's early growth, Goldman stepped back from operational leadership, with Cacioppo continuing as CEO.
Simplicity for non-technical founders, continuous automated testing rather than once-a-year stress, and zero tolerance for superficial "security theater."
To restore trust in software by making verified security continuous, transparent, and accessible to every technology business on the globe.
They eliminated the multi-month compliance bottleneck for B2B software startups, allowing thousands of innovative companies to sell securely to global enterprises on day one.
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