Full-Time
Founding Account Executive
Updated on 9/10/2026
Zania
11-50 employees
AI-powered GRC automation platform
No salary listed
Company Does Not Provide H1B Sponsorship
Palo Alto, CA, USA + 1 more
More locations: San Francisco, CA, USA
In Person
Based in or willing to relocate to Palo Alto; five days per week in person.
Bachelor's
 Sales & Account Management (1) |
|---|
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- The candidate must have a bachelor's degree or equivalent experience.
- The candidate must have at least 5 years of B2B software-as-a-service sales experience and a demonstrated track record of closing six-figure enterprise deals end-to-end.
- The candidate must be able to independently generate pipeline through outbound prospecting rather than relying solely on inbound leads.
- The candidate must have demonstrated success generating leads and building pipeline from scratch.
- The candidate must be able to operate in a highly ambiguous, fast-paced Series A startup environment.
- The candidate must have exceptional written and verbal communication skills.
- The candidate must be able to navigate multi-stakeholder enterprise deals involving Governance, Risk, and Compliance leaders, Chief Information Security Officers, and IT procurement teams.
- The candidate must be able to articulate complex artificial intelligence concepts with credibility.
- The candidate must be based in or willing to relocate to Palo Alto and work in person with the team five days per week.
- The account executive will own the full-cycle sales process from outbound prospecting and lead generation through discovery, demonstrations, negotiation, and closing.
- The account executive will research target accounts, execute outbound campaigns, and build a pipeline of enterprise prospects.
- The account executive will partner with the founders to refine the ideal customer profile, test messaging, and build the foundational sales playbook for future hires.
- The account executive will manage multi-stakeholder enterprise deals involving Governance, Risk, and Compliance leaders, Chief Information Security Officers, and IT procurement teams.
- The account executive will provide customer feedback to Product and Engineering teams by translating customer pain points into actionable product insights.
- Previous experience selling into Security, Compliance, Risk, or artificial intelligence domains is preferred.
Zania provides an AI-powered GRC platform that uses autonomous AI agents to automate security, privacy, and compliance tasks for enterprises. The platform is delivered as a B2B SaaS offering, enabling clients to subscribe and access AI agents, workflows, and dashboards that streamline risk assessments and compliance processes. The agents perform work across regulatory mapping, evidence collection, policy alignment, and security posture reviews, reducing manual effort and cutting assessment timelines from months to minutes. Zania differentiates itself with deep AI-security expertise from the founding team (including experience at major tech companies) and a focus on automating complex governance and regulatory tasks for regulated industries, rather than relying on generic automation. The main goal is to help enterprises simplify, accelerate, and maintain ongoing governance, risk, and compliance by automating tasks and workflows with AI agents.
Company Size
11-50
Company Stage
Series A
Total Funding
$18M
Headquarters
East Palo Alto, California
Founded
2023
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Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- February 2026 launch promises under-one-week assessments, 90% less manual effort, and global availability.
- Zania claims customers including Plaid, Stanford, Grant Thornton, and Big Four firms.
- Expanding from 10% to 100% vendor coverage directly attacks a painful enterprise compliance bottleneck.
What critics are saying
- ServiceNow, OneTrust, and Archer can copy AI features and bundle into existing suites.
- Autonomous assessments face buyer pushback after one false negative triggers audit failures by 2027.
- Small team and single-product focus create existential platform risk if TPRM adoption stalls.
What makes Zania unique
- Autonomous TPRM replaces questionnaires with agent-led vendor assessments end-to-end, launched February 10, 2026.
- Founded by Microsoft, Meta, and Airbnb veterans, Zania sells audit-traceable enterprise GRC automation.
- NEA-backed $18 million Series A and 10x ARR growth signal early product-market fit.
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Benefits
Company Equity
Growth & Insights and Company News
6 month growth
↑ 15%1 year growth
↑ 15%2 year growth
↑ 10%Zania, an AI platform for governance, risk and compliance, has launched Zania Autonomous TPRM, which it claims is the first platform to shift third-party risk management from human-led processes to agent-led execution. The system autonomously executes vendor assessments from intake to final determination, including evidence collection and control evaluation. Early deployments across Fortune 500 companies and Big 4 firms report assessment timelines compressed from over eight weeks to under one week, with up to 90% reduction in manual effort and 80% lower costs per assessment. The platform enables organisations to scale coverage from 10% to 100% of vendors without additional headcount. Founded by leaders from Microsoft, Meta and Airbnb, Zania addresses a market expected to reach nearly $30 billion by 2033. The platform is now available globally.
The vendor questionnaire is dead: Zania launches autonomous third-party risk management. Business Wire New AI agents execute risk assessments end-to-end, enabling CISOs to achieve 100% vendor coverage without adding headcount. PALO ALTO, Calif., February 10, 2026-(BUSINESS WIRE)-Zania, the agentic AI platform for Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC), today announced the launch of Zania Autonomous TPRM. This is the first platform that shifts third-party risk management from human-led processes with AI assistance to agent-led execution with human oversight. Every CISO knows the math: a growing vendor ecosystem, a small risk team, and not enough hours to assess every third party. The result is a coverage gap that turns unassessed vendors into blind spots. This is exactly the kind of risk that shows up in board audit committees and post-breach investigations. Unlike AI copilots that assist humans with drafting or summarization, Zania's autonomous agents execute the assessment from intake to final determination. Agents scope vendors by business context, collect evidence from trust centers and public disclosures, coordinate vendor follow-ups, evaluate controls, and produce audit-ready output with a complete evidence trail. This enables teams to expand coverage without adding headcount. Third-party risk continues to be a primary driver of costly data breaches, with over 30% of all breaches now involving a supply chain partner [1]. As vendor ecosystems expand, GRC teams are caught in a persistent "coverage gap," able to deeply assess only their most critical vendors, leaving the rest as a growing blind spot. The global TPRM market is expected to reach nearly $30 billion by 2033 [2], yet legacy tools have failed to solve this core challenge, focusing on workflow organization rather than task execution. Early Results In early deployments across Fortune 500 enterprises and Big 4 firms, organizations using Zania report: * Assessment timelines compressed from 8+ weeks to under 1 week * Up to 90% reduction in manual assessment effort * Up to 80% lower cost per assessment * Coverage scaled from 10% to 100% of in-scope vendors without increasing headcount From the CEO "For years, 'AI in GRC' has meant a better autocomplete, such as drafting a response, summarizing a report, or helping with a single task. That's not what enterprises need. They need the assessment done, defensibly, at scale, without tripling headcount." "We built Autonomous TPRM to execute the work end to end. It is grounded in evidence, aligned to how risk teams actually operate, and traceable enough to survive an audit. The question isn't whether AI can help with GRC. It's whether your AI can do the job." - Shruti Gupta, Founder & CEO, Zania
Zania, an AI company for security governance, risk, and compliance, raised $18 million in a Series A round led by NEA. The funding will help Zania expand its engineering and go-to-market teams and accelerate its AI platform. Zania's AI agents automate complex compliance tasks, achieving results up to 30× faster and at 90% lower cost. The company has seen 10x ARR growth in six months and secured clients like Plaid and Stanford University.
Zania raises $18M Series A led by NEA to reinvent Enterprise risk & compliance with AI agents.