Shruti Gupta is the founder and CEO of Zania, a Palo Alto startup building agentic AI 'teammates' that execute governance, risk, and compliance work end to end. Before founding Zania in 2023, she spent years inside security teams at Microsoft Identity, Airbnb, Instacart, and Brex, moving from founding security engineer to CISO. In September 2025 Zania raised an $18 million Series A led by NEA, backed by the Anthology Fund (Menlo Ventures and Anthropic) and a syndicate of operators from Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal, and PwC. Her pitch is simple: stop shipping compliance tools that organize work, and start shipping AI that does the work.
Zania builds autonomous AI agents for governance, risk, and compliance (GRC). Founded in 2023 by former CISO Shruti Gupta, the Palo Alto company deploys domain-specific 'AI teammates' that run third-party risk reviews, controls testing, evidence collection, security questionnaires, and continuous compliance across frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, and HIPAA - work it claims runs up to 30x faster at 90% lower cost with 94%+ accuracy. It raised an $18M Series A led by NEA in 2025.