Petual, an AI-powered audit and compliance platform, has secured $20m in funding to modernise Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance and internal audit functions at enterprise scale.
The round drew backing from Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, Cowboy Ventures, and investor Elad Gil. The capital will go towards accelerating product development and expanding the company’s go-to-market operations.
Petual’s agentic AI platform automates the gathering of evidence and the generation of work papers for SOX testing and internal audit. The system is capable of processing both structured and unstructured inputs, including screenshots, PDFs, and Excel files, to produce complete, auditor-ready work papers in a matter of minutes rather than the double or triple-digit hours that most teams currently spend performing the same work manually.
Outputs are formatted to satisfy external auditor requirements, with reasoning traceable directly to source materials. A built-in approval workflow keeps human oversight at the centre of the process throughout.
Petual reports that customers can achieve efficiency gains of between 68% and 80% on existing SOX workflows. Its early client base already includes companies from both the S&P 500 and NASDAQ 100, spanning sectors such as energy, software, infrastructure, manufacturing, and financial services.
Erin Dempsey Heuwetter, head of audit, risk and compliance at Navan, said, “As a large public company, maintaining audit quality while scaling efficiently is critical. Petual enables us to do both, delivering structured, auditor-ready workpapers in a fraction of the time it would take manually.”
a16z general partner and Petual board member Brian Roberts said, “It’s not often that we see an early-stage company able to reach large enterprise customers so early in their journey. This is a testament to both how compelling the market opportunity is for Petual and the strength of the product they’ve built.”
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