2022 has been a banner year for Vanta. We became a unicorn after raising $110m in Series B funding, surpassed 250 employees, and more than tripled our customer base. A growing number of those customers are outside the U.S. as global demand for security and compliance soars.

Today we’re thrilled to announce our latest milestone: We’re expanding our international presence with a new European headquarters in Dublin and growing our team in Sydney. We’re hiring dozens of full-time employees in both locations over the next year.

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Putting our customers first

Putting customers first is at the heart of what we do at Vanta. Hundreds of European startups like incident.io (UK), Belvo (Spain), and IterationX (France) already rely on Vanta to remain secure and compliant. Incident.io uses Vanta’s automated compliance and Trust Reports as levers for transparency. We doubled our customer count in Europe this year, and are continuing to grow across the board.  

In order to better serve the complex security and compliance environment in various regions, we have extended our sales and marketing teams operating in Europe and Australia. We hired locally, first bringing our support and customer success functions to Europe and Australia, followed by leadership hires, and now, building a go-to-market team.

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Localized product experience

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From a product perspective, our first priority is rolling out localized end user onboarding. Vanta’s platform is now available in Spanish -- our most requested non-English language -- and additional language translations are in the works. This will help companies onboard employees whose native language is not English.

Why is Vanta expanding at a time when so many other tech startups are cutting back? Increasingly, compliance has become a competitive advantage for companies that need to unlock new business in a downturn.

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Security from the start

Sephora and Meta were recently hit with steep fines for violating compliance laws (CCPA in California and GDPR in Europe) — the latest example of large companies struggling to retrofit their businesses around a patchwork of global data privacy rules. Many smaller businesses can’t afford large compliance teams, yet they’re subject to the exact same regulations (and fines if they screw up). Vanta allows them to automate security and compliance monitoring without the high overhead cost.

There’s a huge incentive to invest in compliance. As companies seek new revenue streams by selling to bigger customers or new international markets, they must prove they’re compliant with a slew of different security certifications and data privacy standards for customers to even consider them.

Index Ventures found that European startups ranked access to customers as their top reason for entering the US market, but now they’re delaying their expansion into the US until they have bigger teams and deeper pockets. Traditionally, a major obstacle has been the high cost and complexity of global data privacy regulations.

Vanta eliminates those barriers and levels the playing field by making it easy for companies on both sides of the Atlantic to prove they’re compliant with GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2, ISO 27001, etc. We’re also excited to be the first platform to support 10 new international security standards including NIST CSF, ISO 27701, MVSP, FedRamp, and several others. These frameworks serve as part of a solution to accelerate the growth of and help mitigate risks to your business.

I’m so thrilled to be at Vanta and can’t wait to see what is in store for the international market in 2023.

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‍About the author: Paulo Rodriguez, Head of International, is leading Vanta's International growth by building teams in EMEA and APAC.