it supports. The San Francisco-based company is also expanding into Europe: It opened its first European office in Ireland in late 2022, where Reed says Vanta might be even more useful due to Europe’s complex regulatory systems. Additionally, Vanta is keeping its focus on hiring engineers who like talking to customers as well—for the fast feedback loops like those in Cacioppo’s “automated” emails.
At that point, she was finishing her undergraduate degree in economics at Stanford. She would go on to earn a master’s degree in management science and engineering, also from Stanford. After that, she moved into venture capital, working as an analyst for Union Square Ventures from 2010 to 2012 working on early-stage investments—a job she took because “it’s kind of like academia because you get to run around, find people and ask them questions all day.
The idea for Vanta came during Cacioppo’s time at Dropbox, as she was talking to Dropbox customers to get them to use Paper. A member of Dropbox’s legal team told her she couldn’t do that: The security compliance contracts Dropbox customers had signed didn’t yet apply to Dropbox Paper. At first, Vanta was building its product with individual customers, essentially acting as security consultants themselves, and ran on relatively small amounts of funding—$500,000 from Y Combinator and $3 million in seed funding. The company surpassed $10 million in annual recurring revenue before