Dan Zitting spent thirteen years quietly building software that most people never think about - the compliance and audit tools that keep large organizations honest. Then he changed lanes entirely, and took the top job at one of wealth management's best-known technology brands.
The company he now runs is Nitrogen. Most advisors still know it by its former name, Riskalyze, and by the one number it made famous: the Risk Number, a score meant to capture how much market volatility a client can actually stomach. When Zitting became CEO in December 2023, he inherited that legacy and a mandate to widen it - to turn a risk-scoring tool into a broader platform for advisor growth.
His route there was not obvious. Zitting has said he paid his college tuition by selling He-Man action figures on eBay, a small detail that says something about how he operates: resourceful, willing to work an angle, comfortable turning odd inventory into cash flow. He earned a bachelor's in Information Systems and Finance from Colorado State University, then a Master of Accountancy from the University of Notre Dame - a credential that points him toward numbers and controls rather than pure code.
Building in governance, risk and compliance
In 2011 he founded Workpapers.com, described as the first true cloud software for audit and compliance management. Later that year it was acquired by ACL, the company that would become Galvanize. Zitting stayed, and kept climbing. He eventually ran Galvanize as CEO and grew it into a recognized global leader in governance, risk and compliance - roughly 500 employees, some 50 channel partners worldwide, and about $100 million in annual recurring revenue.
Galvanize had, by some accounts, been written off by parts of the industry before its turnaround. That makes what happened next more striking: in a transaction valued at around $1 billion, Diligent acquired the company, creating one of the largest GRC software businesses in the world - a $650 million-plus revenue operation serving 25,000 customers across more than 130 countries. Zitting moved into the role of Chief Product and Strategy Officer at Diligent, where he took on the unglamorous but decisive work of integrating the technology, teams and customer bases of four additional acquired companies.
"The opportunity to serve advisors who deliver professional advice to Americans preparing for significant milestones in their lives is incredibly special to me."- Dan Zitting, on joining Nitrogen
The crossover into wealthtech
Before Nitrogen, Zitting had a brief stop as President and COO of MikMak, an ecommerce analytics company. Then came the call from Nitrogen. The company's founder, Aaron Klein, had decided to step down as CEO after more than a decade running the business at what he described as nearly every waking moment. Klein stayed on the board. Zitting took the wheel, starting December 4, 2023.
Following a beloved founder is one of the harder assignments in software. The playbook Zitting brought was the one he had run before: take a company known for a single strong product and build the connected system around it. At Nitrogen that has meant pushing beyond risk tolerance into proposal generation, investment research, client engagement and, increasingly, artificial intelligence.
His framing of AI is deliberately un-flashy. The point, as he tells it, is not to remove the human advisor from the equation. It is to remove the friction around them - the manual data entry, the buried planning insights, the busywork that eats the hours advisors would rather spend building trust. In his words, the real opportunity in wealthtech is amplifying advisor expertise rather than automating it away.
"The real opportunity in wealthtech isn't replacing advisors with automation - it's amplifying their expertise."- Dan Zitting, on AI at Nitrogen
A contrarian on growth
Zitting has also staked out a pointed view on how advisory firms actually grow. On the WealthTech Today podcast in 2025 he argued that referrals are dead and that sales enablement is the future of advisor growth - a provocative line in an industry that has leaned on word of mouth for generations. It fits a pattern in his career: he tends to bet that structured systems and repeatable process beat informal habit.
Under his leadership Nitrogen has continued to ship. At its sold-out Fearless Summit in late 2024 the company unveiled an expanded investment research product and a set of AI-powered features, and it has since talked publicly about an agentic engine built to work alongside advisors. The through-line, from a cloud audit tool in 2011 to an AI platform for financial advice today, is consistent: find a profession weighed down by manual work, and hand it better software.
There is a quieter thread too. Zitting has spoken about dating his high school sweetheart, losing touch, reconnecting years later, and marrying her. For a career defined by acquisitions, integrations and turnarounds, it is a reminder that the durable things in his life have a way of coming back around.