Vanta Promotes Sarah Scharf to CMO as Compliance Startup Targets Trust

Vanta, the security-compliance software startup valued at roughly $4 billion in a funding round last year, promoted Sarah Scharf to chief marketing officer. The company confirmed the move in an interview with CMO Insider.

Scharf joined Vanta in 2020 as vice president of marketing. She now takes over a brand that has already tried to stand out in a sector known for grim messaging. Vanta's billboards around San Francisco carried lines like "Compliance that doesn't SOC 2 much." The tone is deliberate. Scharf said she wants to keep marketing "with a wink" while repositioning the company around a single concept: trust.

"How can we capture the moment and also reposition Vanta in a way to showcase how we help businesses of all sizes instill and maintain that trust in a world where AI makes it harder to come by and maintain?" she said.

Vanta's core product is an automated platform that helps companies run SOC 2 audits, assess third-party risk, and manage AI governance. The customer list includes Snowflake, GitHub, and the Golden State Warriors. The company started as a tool for startups checking a compliance box. It now sells to large enterprises that need to prove security to their own customers. The marketing challenge shifts from selling a simple task to selling credibility.

Scharf said the marketing budget is flowing into influencer partnerships and a video podcast launched this summer called "The Tabletop." The show invites chief information security officers to role-play how they would handle a security breach. She called the format "what people want to watch and engage with" and noted that it feeds into LLM search discovery as owned, high-authority content.

Sarah Ashdown, consumer marketing and revenue director at the consultancy Manifesto Growth Architects, said trust cannot be claimed through positioning alone. "Trust is earned over time through the quality of the service, the outcomes customers achieve, and the relationship a business builds with them," she said. The comment underscores the gap between Vanta's playful brand and the serious work of securing enterprise data. Scharf acknowledged the constraint. "We're a compliance company, we're giving you security information," she said. "Some of that is going to be bland and boring. What can we do to make it just a little zingier?"

Internally, Vanta is using AI to resize advertising assets and edit content. The team prototypes campaigns with Midjourney. Scharf said she screens job candidates for AI proficiency, though she added it is "not from a tokenmaxxing perspective."

The CMO promotion comes at a moment when security compliance software is drawing more attention. Rivals including Drata and Secureframe have raised large rounds. Vanta's valuation of $4 billion puts it among the biggest private companies in the space. Scharf's task is to keep the brand distinctive as the market grows more crowded.