Andera, an AI-native platform built to automate the internal audit function, has secured $37m in a Series A funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.
The investment marks Lightspeed’s conviction that the audit sector has reached a pivotal moment for AI-driven transformation. The venture firm spent several months building its thesis before committing capital, consulting with finance and audit leaders across Fortune 500 companies spanning technology, financial services, healthcare, and consumer sectors, alongside Big Four partners and former Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) officials. Lightspeed concluded that a genuine opportunity had opened for a new entrant, driven by two converging forces: the arrival of large language model reasoning capable of handling complex audit workflows, and mounting pressure from CFOs demanding efficiency gains of 200-300% from back-office functions.
Andera’s platform automates the end-to-end testing of every control type, from user access provisioning through to complex bad debt reserve and management review controls, spanning SOX, operational, and compliance categories. The system processes hundreds of millions of tokens of financial evidence per control across sources including Excel workbooks, PDFs, system screenshots, and journal entries. At its core is a proprietary agentic retrieval engine that draws relevant evidence across billions of tokens without the recall failures associated with conventional vector-retrieval approaches. The architecture also includes probabilistic beam search to concentrate compute on uncertain areas of the data graph, and bespoke agents that interact with financial workpapers with precision. The company’s longer-term vision extends to documenting, assessing, and testing any category of control regardless of industry, complexity, or the underlying system.
Andera was founded by CEO Aryo Patel and CTO Tinah Hong. Patel previously worked on Azure infrastructure scaling at Microsoft and on the trading desk at Jane Street, approaching the audit problem through the lens of reasoning rather than IT infrastructure. Hong, who has known Patel since middle school in Chicago and studied alongside him at MIT, previously built machine learning systems at Stripe and worked as a software engineer at Microsoft. The founding team has been supplemented with deep industry expertise: the company’s first hire, Carina Averilla, is a former Deloitte auditor and ex-head of US accounting at Revolut, while Jared Lauber, who leads partnerships, brings three decades of risk and audit experience from organisations including EY, Instacart, McKesson, and Williams-Sonoma.
The platform is designed to reclaim time for audit professionals who have long found the most intellectually demanding aspects of their role crowded out by the operational burden of busy season.
By handling evidence collection, control testing, and workpaper generation, Andera aims to free auditors to focus on identifying enterprise risks, spotting where growth opportunities are being missed, and contributing to decisions with genuine strategic consequence. The company frames this not as a displacement of audit professionals, but as an extension of their capability, enabling them to cover more of the enterprise and engage with a wider risk surface.
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