In compliance, pain isn’t measured in paper cuts. It’s measured in months drained by risk assessments, controls testing, and evidence collection that bury even elite teams in tedium. That’s the mess Zania is eliminating. The SF startup closed an $18 million Series A led by NEA, with Anthology Fund (backed by Menlo Ventures and Anthropic), Palm Drive Capital, and a syndicate of executives from Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal, ByteDance, Reddit, Roblox, and PwC.
Zania’s story starts with Shruti Gupta, who founded the company in 2024 after living the grind firsthand. Gupta served as CISO and AI Security Architect at Microsoft Identity, Engineering Director of Trust at Brex, Head of Security and Compliance at Instacart, with earlier stops leading security at Airbnb, OpenDNS, and Zynga. With a Georgia Tech M.S. in Computer Science focused on information security, Gupta built Zania to free compliance teams from the endless slog she once managed herself.
The product isn’t a dashboard. Zania builds agentic AI “teammates” that autonomously run end-to-end GRC workflows, risk assessments, controls testing, evidence collection, gap analyses, with audit-ready explainability and enterprise-grade security. Accuracy runs above 94 percent. Work that dragged for months now takes minutes, cutting costs up to 90 percent. Global reach? Eighty-plus languages and hundreds of frameworks. Current adopters include Plaid, Grant Thornton, Stanford University, and a Big Four firm.
This isn’t slideware. Zania’s platform has executed thousands of policies and evidence files in single passes, backed by SOC2 Type 2 certification. The architecture is cloud-native on Kubernetes, with encrypted, region-segmented storage and monitoring through Prometheus and Grafana. Patents are pending on multi-agent orchestration for compliance automation.
With fresh capital, Zania plans to triple engineering, product, and go-to-market teams. Expansion is underway into healthcare, insurance, and manufacturing, while partnerships with Tata Consultancy Services, HCLTech, and the Big Four broaden reach. The roadmap includes self-service portals for SMBs, advanced analytics for continuous monitoring, expanded frameworks, and deeper multi-cloud integration.
Compliance has always been a tax. Zania is converting it into an advantage. Congratulations to Shruti Gupta and the Zania team. Respect as well to Mustafa Neemuchwala at NEA for backing this trajectory. Governance, risk, and compliance finally moves at the speed of business.
