Eva Pittas built her second act in the least theatrical corner of business. Compliance is a world of evidence requests, control descriptions, policy documents and professionals asking one another whether a system did what someone promised it would do. It is not where startup mythology usually looks for romance. Pittas looked there and saw a plot: companies buying software to prepare for audits, then walking their work across an awkward border to a different set of people who would conduct the audit itself.
She had spent a career learning how much can go wrong at that border. Before Thoropass, Pittas spent roughly 24 years at Citigroup. She rose to managing director and led work across IT control, compliance, risk and vendor management. A biography prepared for a 2019 fintech roundtable said she led more than 400 professionals and managed global programs and relationships with regulators. Her education in finance came from NYU Stern. Her practical education arrived in meeting rooms where policy had to survive contact with operations.
Pittas did not flee rules. She became fluent in what rules ask of institutions, what institutions ask of vendors, and how a sensible demand can turn into an expensive procession of spreadsheets. After the financial crisis, she worked on Citi's response. Later, she watched banks press their expectations outward, asking technology vendors to demonstrate their security and controls. A bank's caution became a startup's procurement problem.
“There has not been much innovation in the landscape of information security audits.”Eva Pittas, on NYSE Floor Talk
A long apprenticeship in friction
The interesting detail in Pittas's career is not merely its length. It is the number of vantage points she accumulated. At Citi, she sat on the enterprise side of the table. In 2017, she founded BRCG, a boutique consultancy that helped younger companies build controls and make it through the diligence imposed by large buyers. Now she could see the same transaction from the vendor's chair. The requirements were legitimate. The route through them was often obscure.
Two founders, Austin Ogilvie and Sam Li, had met the problem by stepping directly into it. Each had built companies in regulated markets. Each had discovered that winning enterprise trust could feel like learning a language after the exam had started. Ogilvie has recalled a coffee with Li in which Li described the cost and pain of compliance at his previous startup. Ogilvie recognized his own experience. An introduction to Pittas supplied the third view: decades spent designing, enforcing and explaining the controls from inside a global institution.
Together they started Laika in 2019, later renamed Thoropass. Pittas was 52. The age matters because she has chosen to make it matter, not as a disclaimer but as a useful fact. “Starting a venture-backed tech company at that stage of life - and in a field where women founders are still rare - was both challenging and deeply rewarding,” she told Forbes. The sentence contains no apology. It treats time as capital already paid in.
The company began with an unfashionably specific ambition: make compliance easier to operate and easier to prove. Software could collect evidence and organize controls. Experts could guide a team through an unfamiliar framework. Auditors could test the result. Thoropass wanted those functions connected, reducing the handoffs that Pittas had learned to distrust.
The handoff is the villain
Pittas's recurring question is almost comically modest: why is there so much friction between compliance teams and auditors? The answer, in her telling, is structural. A company may use one system to operate controls, another adviser to interpret a framework and an outside auditor to test the evidence. Each boundary invites repetition. Context gets lost. Findings arrive late. Everybody remains independent, but nobody feels particularly joined up.
Thoropass's response was to become more than a preparation tool. The company developed in-house audit capabilities and secured credentials that include an accredited CPA firm, Qualified Security Assessor status for payment-card work and HITRUST assessment capability. Pittas argues that the same platform can carry a customer from readiness to delivered audit while preserving the rigor the report requires.
This is a delicate claim in a profession built on independence, a point Pittas addressed directly in a 2023 article. Technology does not dissolve the standard. It can, however, make the work more legible: who owns a control, which evidence supports it, when it was collected, and what needs attention. Her preferred future is less a robot replacing judgment than a system preventing humans from wasting judgment on scavenger hunts.
A company moves from thesis to scale
Selected public milestones. Funding bars show round size; the customer bar is a separate index for visual sequence, not a shared financial scale.
Investors backed the thesis. Laika announced a $35 million Series B in 2021 after reporting 4.5-fold year-over-year annual recurring revenue growth and fourfold customer growth. A $50 million Series C followed in 2022, led by Fin Capital, bringing total funding close to $100 million. The company said its active user base had grown by more than 1,000 percent over the preceding year. By 2025, Thoropass said it served more than 1,000 customers across software, financial technology and healthcare.
The years that do not fit on a pitch deck
Pittas's public account of leadership is more domestic than the standard founder catechism. She is a mother in a blended family of six children. In a 2025 post, she described a period after remarrying when the family - five girls and one boy - needed stability. She was unhappy with a changed culture at Citi, but chose to stay. Familiar work left more room for the family to become one.
The choice complicates the usual story of courage, which tends to reward the person who leaves. Pittas stayed because leaving would have spent energy her family needed elsewhere. She now calls that a season, neither a permanent surrender nor a secret failure. “Leading at home made me a better leader at work,” she wrote, crediting those years with teaching her to balance priorities, listen and lead with empathy.
There is a pleasing symmetry in the lesson. Her company is built to reduce damaging handoffs. Her family life taught her to pay attention to transitions, competing priorities and the people carrying work between systems. This does not mean a household became a management laboratory. It means experience refuses to remain in the boxes a résumé assigns it.
The accumulated route
Begins a roughly 24-year career at Citigroup.
Founds BRCG to help startups build controls and pass enterprise diligence.
Co-founds Laika, now Thoropass, with Austin Ogilvie and Sam Li.
Company raises a $50 million Series C after its earlier $35 million Series B.
Named to Forbes' 50 Over 50 and Inc.'s Female Founders 500.
Pittas says customer conversations remain among the most valuable parts of her role. She listens for what works, what does not and where Thoropass belongs in a customer's larger strategy. “That feedback is a gift,” she has written. It is the remark of an operator who knows a compliment is pleasant but a complaint contains instructions.
Her interests outside work are reassuringly free of frameworks: tennis, cooking, travel and time with an extended family. She has also supported women's professional growth and served on the board of Damian Family Care Centers from 2017 to 2020. In 2024, Odyssey House NYC gave her its Leadership Award, recognizing nearly a decade of involvement by Pittas and her family.
“For me, being over 50 has been an incredible advantage.”Eva Pittas, reflecting on her 2025 Forbes recognition
The advantage of arriving later
In 2025, Forbes placed Pittas on its 50 Over 50: Innovation list. Inc. named her to its Female Founders 500, citing Thoropass's AI-powered compliance work and a 28 percent increase in headcount. Pittas responded to the Forbes recognition by writing about wisdom, patience and presence. She had learned from mistakes, good mentors and difficult ones. Age, in her account, offered not omniscience but a clearer sense of values.
That clarity may be the central tool in her story. Pittas did not enter technology with a fantasy that software makes difficult institutions simple. She had seen enough institutions to know better. Her wager was narrower and more credible: the right software, experts and auditors, arranged around the same work, could remove needless confusion while leaving the necessary scrutiny intact.
Founder profiles often adore the blank slate. Pittas offers the opposite pleasure. Her page was crowded before Thoropass began: a long bank career, a consultancy, regulators, vendors, a blended family, colleagues, customers and the memory of processes that asked intelligent people to perform foolishly repetitive tasks. At 52, she did not start empty. She started annotated.
The audit will never be a carnival, and perhaps civilization should be grateful. Pittas is working toward something better suited to the task: a process in which the evidence is where it ought to be, the humans spend their time on judgment, and fewer people have to ask which spreadsheet contains the truth. After 24 years of learning the rules, she earned the right to question the choreography.