Zania, a company specializing in agentic AI for governance, risk, and compliance (GRC), has raised $18 million in a Series A funding round led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA). The oversubscribed round also saw participation from Anthology Fund (backed by Menlo Ventures and Anthropic), Palm Drive Capital, and a group of senior executives from companies such as Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal, ByteDance, Reddit, Roblox, and PwC.

As regulatory requirements grow increasingly complex, compliance teams are under immense pressure. Global anti-money-laundering fines reached a record $19.3 billion in 2024, according to Fineksus, while Oxford Economics reports that 95% of organizations have increased compliance budgets by around 12% year-over-year. Traditional GRC platforms, however, largely provide dashboards without executing the underlying work, forcing enterprises to rely on large teams to manually handle the compliance process. Consequently, nearly all organizations—about 98%—plan to integrate AI into their compliance functions by 2026 to achieve meaningful automation.

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Zania addresses this need with specialized AI “teammates” capable of performing risk assessments, gathering evidence, testing controls, and conducting gap analyses—reducing workflows that once took months to mere minutes. Its Gap Assessment tool, for example, can process thousands of policies and evidence files in over 80 languages, map them to hundreds of control requirements, and identify deficiencies in a single pass.

Since launching its AI agents, Zania has experienced rapid growth, achieving tenfold ARR expansion in just six months. Key clients include fintech leader Plaid, global advisory firm Grant Thornton, Stanford University, and a Big Four accounting firm. The company has also formed strategic partnerships with major IT and consulting firms, such as Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and HCLTech, to broaden the reach of its AI compliance solutions.

“Since introducing our AI agents last year, Zania has seen exceptional growth in both revenue and customers,” said Shruti Gupta, Founder and CEO of Zania. “Our mission is to transform the compliance, risk, and audit landscape by turning traditional tools into intelligent AI teammates that can manage complex tasks from start to finish.”

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The new funding will allow Zania to meet rising demand by tripling its engineering and go-to-market teams and accelerating development of its agentic AI platform, which orchestrates complete compliance workflows rather than simply tracking them.

“Cybersecurity GRC is essential, yet current processes are largely manual, inefficient, and difficult to scale,” said Mustafa Neemuchwala, Partner at NEA. “Shruti and her team combine deep expertise in cybersecurity, GRC, and agentic AI, enabling enterprises to achieve results in minutes rather than months. Their solution has already gained strong market traction, and we’re proud to lead this Series A round.”

Kenneth Moras, Head of Security GRC at Plaid, added: “Zania’s AI agents have transformed our risk assessment process. By automating evidence collection and analysis, what used to be a months-long effort is now completed in minutes, allowing our team to focus on strategic risk management.”

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