Zania Raises $18M Series A Led by NEA to Reinvent Enterprise Risk & Compliance with AI Agents

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Zania, an agentic AI company for security governance, risk, and compliance (GRC), today announced it has closed an $18 million Series A funding round led by NEA (New Enterprise Associates). The oversubscribed round includes participation from Anthology Fund (backed by Menlo Ventures and Anthropic), Palm Drive Capital, and a syndicate of senior executives from Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal, ByteDance, Reddit, Roblox, and PwC.

As regulatory complexity intensifies, compliance teams face mounting pressure. According to a 2024 Fineksus report, global anti‑money‑laundering enforcement penalties reached a record $19.3 billion in 2024. A study from Oxford Economics found that 95% of organizations have increased compliance budgets by roughly 12% year‑over‑year. Yet most legacy GRC tools stop at dashboards, leaving enterprises to fund large teams to perform the manual work those dashboards merely expose. It’s no surprise that nearly 98% of organizations plan to embed AI into their compliance programs by 2026, creating demand for intelligent automation that delivers results—not reports.

Zania answers that call with domain‑specific AI “teammates” that execute risk assessments, evidence collection, controls testing, and gap analyses—compressing workflows that once took months into minutes. For example, Zania’s Gap Assessment module ingests thousands of policies and evidence files across 80+ languages, maps them to hundreds of control requirements, and pinpoints deficiencies in a single pass.

Since its debut, Zania has gained significant momentum, achieving 10x ARR growth in the last six months. Recent customer wins include fintech leader Plaid, global accounting and advisory firm Grant Thornton, Stanford University, and one of the Big Four accounting firms. Zania has also forged strategic alliances with major consulting and IT services providers — including Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and HCLTech — to expand the reach of its AI compliance agents.

“Zania has experienced explosive growth in revenue and customers since we launched our first AI agents late last year,” said Shruti Gupta, Founder and CEO of Zania. “We’re excited to continue revolutionizing the security risk, compliance, and audit space by transforming it from tools that merely organize work into true AI teammates that execute highly complex and critical tasks from start to finish.”

Zania will use the capital to meet surging market demand by tripling its engineering and go‑to‑market teams and accelerating its agentic AI platform, which orchestrates complex, end‑to‑end compliance workflows—not just tracking work, but executing it.

“Cybersecurity GRC is mission‑critical, yet workflows remain manual, painful, and impossible to scale,” said Mustafa Neemuchwala, Partner at NEA. “Shruti and the team at Zania bring together a rare combination of battle‑tested cybersecurity, GRC, and agentic AI expertise, giving enterprises minutes‑not‑months speed. Their strong product‑market fit is already driving rapid adoption, and we’re thrilled to lead Zania’s Series A.”

“Zania’s AI agents have made our risk assessments dramatically faster and more efficient. By automating evidence collection and analysis, they turned a manual marathon into a sprint, freeing our team to focus on strategic risk management,” said Kenneth Moras, Head of Security GRC, Plaid.

About Zania

Zania is an agentic AI company developing domain‑specific agents for security, risk, compliance, and audit. Engineered for accuracy and security, Zania empowers enterprises—including Fortune 500 companies and top audit advisory firms—to perform critical GRC work in minutes, achieving results up to 30× faster and at 90% lower cost, with over 94% accuracy. Zania’s leadership team has previously led AI and Security at Microsoft, Deloitte, Bain & Company, Airbnb, Instacart, Brex, and PwC.

For more information, visit https://zania.ai/.

About NEA

New Enterprise Associates, Inc. (NEA) is a global venture capital firm focused on helping entrepreneurs build transformational businesses across multiple stages, sectors, and geographies. With more than $28 billion in cumulative committed capital since the firm’s founding in 1977, NEA invests in technology and healthcare companies at all stages of a company’s lifecycle, from seed stage through IPO. The firm’s track record includes 284 portfolio company IPOs and 500+ mergers and acquisitions. Learn more at www.nea.com.