Announcing Drata’s Series C

A little over a year ago, I got to wake up most of the Drata team with some very exciting news: just 10 months after launching out of stealth, Drata had become one of the fastest companies ever to achieve unicorn status, with a $100 million Series B round.

One of the things I emphasized then, as I always have, is that fundraising is a tactic, not a goal or an outcome. In the year since Series B, we have launched 14+ frameworks from PCI DSS to GDPR and NIST 800-153, expanded Drata into an automated compliance and risk management platform, translated the application into multiple languages, launched a community to better serve security professionals, and so much more, while acquiring thousands of new customers. 

22 months since launching out of stealth, and the core fundamentals that Drata was built on remain true. We created Drata to serve as the trust layer between great companies and those they do business with—auditors, partners, their customers, and more. 

Thousands of companies including Lemonade, Airbase, Notion, and Bamboo HR trust Drata with their continuous compliance needs and hundreds have switched from legacy providers. And the most exciting part of it all is that we’ve just barely scratched the surface. There are so many more companies around the globe seeking the benefits of compliance automation and we can’t wait to serve their needs.

That’s why I couldn’t be more excited to announce that Drata has officially raised a $200 million Series C round to continue to accelerate the growth of our automation platform. This round doubles our valuation in little over a year. We are honored that both ICONIQ Growth and GGV Capital, who respectively led our Series B and Series A rounds, teamed up to co-lead this round together. We’re proud of the additional investments from Alkeon Capital, Cowboy Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and Silicon Valley CISO Investors (SVCI)—who have once again rallied around us for this momentous round. 

We are also thrilled to welcome S Ventures, SentinelOne’s Venture arm, and FOG Ventures (Operators Guild) to the Drata family. I also have the honor of recognizing some strategic investors that have backed us in this round and previous including Satya Nadella (Microsoft), Frank Slootman (Snowflake), Olivier Pomel (Datadog), Amit Agarwal (Datadog), Jonathan Rubinstein (Amazon), Jennifer Tejada (PagerDuty), and Jeff Weiner (Linkedin). 

The inevitable question: Why now?

We’ve all seen the headlines. After record growth these past few years, tech valuations are stagnant. 

So why are we moving forward and raising funding now? 

I’m going to sum it up in one sentence: to better serve you. We are fortunate to have thousands of customers that choose us for their risk and compliance needs, and we do not take that for granted.

Increased security threats, combined with rapid changes in global regulations, and reliance on remote working are all making compliance essential.

This becomes even more crucial in economically challenging times. We actually can do a lot more to serve customers. 

We founded Drata during the pandemic—a time of increasing uncertainty—and we immediately started seeing increased demand for our product. In less than 100 days, word was spreading, and we had 100 customers automating SOC 2 compliance with us.

Our customers told us Drata was a time saver and revenue generator. As one startup put it, “before Drata, I always viewed compliance as a drain on resources.” It helped them get products to market and through security reviews faster, and thus, accelerated revenue.

So what’s next for Drata (and you)?

While many companies start out with a minimal viable product and pump money into sales and marketing, we did the opposite. From the very beginning, we invested heavily in product and engineering to ensure we had the product that could serve the market, and so that we could continue to build differentiated experiences our customers desired at #drataspeed (one of our favorite expressions around here). We doubled down on that strategy one year ago at Series B and are now tripling down so we can continue to deliver product enhancements even faster. We’ve also been focused on ensuring the right world-class talent is in place—including our recent announcement of Adam Aarons joining Drata as CRO and Troy Markowitz becoming our COO. You’ll be seeing us more in global markets, and as a way for security and compliance teams at all stages of their journey to leverage automation without sacrificing customization.

While automation is what powers the platform, the 'human' elements that you’ve come to love about Drata will not be going away either. 

We invite you to take a look around the platform and please continue to provide us with feedback.  

I, and the entire Drata team, are immensely grateful to all of you—our customers, our partners, our auditors, and our incredible community. 

Cheers to how far we’ve come together in such a short time, and to all that’s ahead!