---
title: 'Ex Founder at Zania'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/ex-founder-zania-palo-alto-0y2683te77vr'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-15'
---

# Ex Founder at Zania

- **Company:** Zania
- **Location:** Palo Alto, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-07-30
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-15
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/zania/f2215dfc-51b2-4216-b29d-2c3bf3e688a9

## Job description

Ex-Founder

## Why Zania

Every enterprise spends millions of dollars on Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC). It's one of the most critical, yet universally painful, parts of running a business. For decades, this industry has been dominated by legacy systems with notoriously low NPS scores, making it totally ripe for disruption. Zania is building agentic AI for Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) to solve this massive problem. We are on a rocketship trajectory, creating intelligent agents that automate and augment the most complex risk and compliance workflows. We have found exceptional product-market fit and are scaling our team very quickly. Some reasons to join Zania are:

- Dream Customers: Our customers are the most notable enterprises in the world, including FAANG, Big 4 firms, and a portfolio of top customers.
- Tier 1 Backing: Funded by a leading Tier 1 venture capital fund, giving us the resources to build a generational company.
- World-Class Team: Zania is hiring the best. Our team includes AI and Security leaders from Airbnb, Microsoft, Bain & Company, Deloitte, PwC, Brex, and Instacart.
- Pioneering Technology: Our engineers and GRC experts work at the absolute forefront of applied AI, building the next generation of agentic systems that will define the future of compliance.
- Hyper-Growth: We have seen 10x ARR growth in the last year and are rapidly expanding.
- Competitive Compensation & Equity: You will be rewarded like an owner.

## Role Overview

This isn’t a traditional corporate role. It’s a creative and operational challenge built for a battle-tested entrepreneur.

Zania is growing at a breakneck pace. We are looking for an ex-founder to act as a co-pilot to our founding team. We don’t want someone who needs a playbook; we want someone who has built the playbook from scratch before. You will operate as a true generalist and founder proxy—taking on our most critical 0-to-1 initiatives, driving aggressive growth experiments, and managing strategic investor relations.

If you are a former founder looking to join a deeply technical, hyper-growth rocketship and get your hands dirty building a generational company, this is your arena.

## What You’ll Do

- Drive 0-to-1 Strategic Initiatives: Parachute into the most critical areas of the business—whether that is standing up a new revenue channel, fixing an operational bottleneck, or launching a new product initiative—and build it from the ground up.
- Accelerate Growth: Act as a high-agency growth engine. You will identify untapped GTM motions, build strategic partnerships, and execute experiments with relentless speed.
- Manage Investor Relations: Work directly alongside the CEO on fundraising strategy, board deck creation, investor updates, and capital allocation planning.
- Act as a Founder Proxy: Operate with the authority, context, and extreme ownership of the founding team to unblock teams and accelerate decision-making across the company.
- Move Fast with High Autonomy: Low friction, high output. You will concept, execute, and iterate on business strategies without waiting for approval chains.

## What We Care About

- Founder DNA: You have been in the driver's seat. You know what it takes to survive, pivot, and scale in highly ambiguous environments.
- Extreme Agency: You don't wait for permission or perfectly outlined scopes. You find the biggest fire or the biggest opportunity and you own it.
- Strategic & Tactical Range: You can debate high-level capital strategy with board members at 9:00 AM and manually scrape a lead list or format a customer proposal at 10:00 AM.
- Execution Speed: You have a ruthless ability to prioritize and an obsession with momentum.
- Commercial Taste: You know the difference between a vanity metric and a lever that actually moves the needle for enterprise revenue.

## Minimum Qualifications

- Experience as a Founder, Co-Founder, or early executive at a venture-backed or bootstrapped startup
- Track record of scaling revenue, operations, or product initiatives from zero to tangible traction
- Deep understanding of B2B/Enterprise SaaS growth dynamics and venture capital operations
- Exceptional written and verbal communication skills—you must be able to credibly interact with CISOs, Fortune 500 executives, and Tier 1 investors
- Financial and analytical fluency to model growth scenarios, build forecasts, and structure strategic bets

How to Apply Skip the traditional resume. Send us a one-page memo answering one of the following prompts:

- The Autopsy: What was the biggest failure or hardest lesson from your last startup, and how has it changed the way you operate?
- The Growth Plan: Outline a highly unconventional, zero-budget GTM experiment you would run in your first 30 days at Zania to capture the attention of enterprise CISOs.

The bar is simple: Does this memo prove you have founder-level clarity, grit, and strategic taste? Location Based in (or willing to relocate to) Palo Alto, California, working in-person with the team five days a week.

## Compensation & Benefits

- Flexible PTO policy
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance
- Meals and snacks in the office
- Relocation support

Zania is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, national origin, disability, age, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy or related condition, or any other basis protected by law.

## About Zania

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Zania provides an autonomous AI agent platform that executes Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) work, including controls testing, risk assessments, audits, and security questionnaires.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A)
- **Headquarters**: Palo Alto, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: Shruti Gupta

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: AI-powered Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) / Cybersecurity
- **Target customers**: B2B, Enterprise (Fortune 500, Big Four audit & advisory firms, CISOs, Heads of GRC, TPRM leaders)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: To automate and execute complex GRC work with provable accuracy, replacing manual processes with autonomous AI agents.

## Products & Services
- **Autonomous Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM)**: AI agents that handle vendor risk tiering, evidence collection, validation, follow-ups, and continuous monitoring end-to-end.
- **First-Party Risk**: AI-driven qualitative and quantitative risk evaluations based on a company's unique systems, controls, and data.
- **Continuous Compliance**: Agents that continuously collect evidence, identify gaps against any framework (SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS, NIST CSF, GDPR, etc.), and assist with remediation.
- **Controls Testing**: Autonomous testing of 100% of controls for both design and operating effectiveness, with actionable recommendations.
- **Security Questionnaires**: AI that leverages a company's security context to answer incoming vendor questionnaires with precision in minutes.
- **Self-Governing Policies**: Policies that update themselves to stay in sync with a company's compliance and tech stack.
- **Agent-Driven Risk Intelligence**: Continuous monitoring of vendors using data from integrations, incidents, supply chain, threat intel, breach history, and company profiles.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding of $18.0M (Series A, led by NEA, announced October 2025)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: NEA (lead), Menlo Ventures, Anthropic, Palm Drive Capital, AWS ISV Accelerate Program. Advisors include Mike Curtis (Ex-Head of Eng, Airbnb), Anand Deshpande (Founder & Chairman, Persistent Systems), and George Kurtz (Founder & CEO, Crowdstrike).
- **Growth Signals**: Trusted by Fortune 500 companies and Big Four audit & advisory firms. Launched "Autonomous TPRM" in February 2026. Headcount grew 17.6% YoY. Active job postings grew 125% YoY. LinkedIn follower count grew 85.7% yearly.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Purpose-built AI agents** for GRC, not a general-purpose LLM wrapper — trained on domain-specific GRC workflows.
- **Provable accuracy and explainability**: Features like confidence scores, visible reasoning, source references, and deep research make outputs audit-ready.
- **Enterprise-grade security**: SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, private models with no training on customer data, and a reported hallucination rate of <0.01%.
- **End-to-end workflow automation**: Agents handle the entire GRC process from evidence collection to remediation, not just individual tasks.
- **Founder-led domain expertise**: CEO Shruti Gupta previously led AI at Microsoft and held founding security/CISO roles at Airbnb, Instacart, and Brex.

## Strategic Focus
- **Autonomous execution**: Shifting GRC from human-led processes with AI assistance to agent-led execution with human oversight.
- **Expanding TPRM capabilities**: Launched "Autonomous TPRM" in February 2026 to fully automate vendor risk management.
- **Continuous compliance**: Moving from point-in-time audits to 24/7 continuous monitoring and evidence collection.
- **Enterprise scale**: Targeting deeper penetration into Fortune 500 and Big Four firms.

## Why Work Here
- **Rocketship growth**: Early-stage, well-funded startup ($18M Series A) with strong investor backing from top-tier VCs (NEA, Menlo Ventures) and strategic partners (Anthropic).
- **Compelling mission**: Opportunity to build the future of AI-driven GRC, a massive market with high demand.
- **Compensation**: Top-of-market pay with meaningful equity ownership.
- **Perks**: Flexible PTO, free catered meals and snacks, relocation and immigration support.
- **Work environment**: In-office presence in Palo Alto, CA, with a presence in India. The team is small (~11 employees) and technical (25% of staff in technical roles).
- **Leadership**: Founded by Shruti Gupta, a former AI leader at Microsoft and founding security/CISO at Airbnb, Instacart, and Brex. Backed by world-class advisors from Crowdstrike, Airbnb, and Persistent Systems.
- **Growth trajectory**: Rapidly growing with 9 active job postings, 125% YoY increase in job postings, and strong revenue growth signals.

## Sources
1. [zania.ai](https://zania.ai/)
2. [zania.ai/careers](https://zania.ai/careers)
3. [zania.ai/about-us](https://zania.ai/about-us)
4. [linkedin.com/company/zaniaai](https://www.linkedin.com/company/zaniaai)
5. [cbinsights.com](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/zania)

## Other roles at Zania

- [Founding Enterprise SDR](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-enterprise-sdr-zania-palo-alto-avagb6jpshwp) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Graphics Designer | Framer & Video Editing](https://feeny.ai/job/graphics-designer-framer-video-editing-zania-india-arcz8dsand5b) — India
- [Eng Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/eng-manager-zania-palo-alto-8n4xxwd00hej) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Growth & Demand Generation](https://feeny.ai/job/growth-demand-generation-zania-palo-alto-rmnzg5wgajdv) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Software Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-zania-palo-alto-exkya0ggm5jz) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Head of Engineering](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-engineering-zania-palo-alto-bpt37pjsyjye) — Palo Alto, CA
- [GRC Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/grc-engineer-zania-palo-alto-r7cjfd25ady5) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Founding Account Executive](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-account-executive-zania-palo-alto-tpa1c47yx77n) — Palo Alto, CA
- [Applied AI Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/applied-ai-engineer-zania-palo-alto-h5ctw8143rhh) — Palo Alto, CA