Petual Raises $20 Million to Revolutionize Audit and Compliance with AI Technology

Petual, an AI-powered platform for audit and compliance, has successfully secured $20 million in funding from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, Cowboy Ventures, and Elad Gil. The capital injection aims to expedite product development and enhance market outreach. The current landscape of Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance and internal audit processes within public enterprises is labor-intensive and predominantly manual.

Auditors often navigate through numerous unstructured files for each control, a task that involves gathering, enriching, and analyzing evidence, conducting tests, and producing documentation. This recurrent process leaves minimal space for risk management activities that necessitate auditor judgment and stakeholder involvement. The annual expenditure on SOX in the US market alone exceeds $8 billion. Petual's platform introduces agentic AI into SOX testing and internal audit, enabling autonomous execution of evidence gathering and work paper generation at an enterprise scale for the first time.

The platform can process both structured and unstructured evidence, such as screenshots, PDFs, and Excel files, to generate comprehensive work papers within minutes, a significant improvement compared to the hours typically spent manually by most teams. The platform's outputs align with external auditor expectations and templates, featuring detailed reasoning traceable to source documents.

A built-in review workflow supports the approval chain, ensuring human oversight remains integral to the process. Petual's clients have reported efficiency gains ranging from 68 to 80 percent in their current SOX workflows. Early adopters of Petual's technology include S&P 500 and NASDAQ 100 companies across various industries, such as energy, software, infrastructure, manufacturing, and financial services. Key figures from these organizations have praised Petual for its ability to deliver structured, auditor-ready work papers in a fraction of the time required for manual creation.

The Petual team comprises individuals with extensive expertise at the intersection of technology, AI, risk, and audit. The team members have previously contributed to the development of internal audit teams and engineering organizations, with prior experience at prominent companies including Stripe, Retool, Lyft, and the Big Four. Before establishing Petual, Founder and CEO Snir Kodesh led engineering at Retool. Additionally, the team includes leaders such as Eliot Walker, former CTO of Fleet at Lyft, and David Coulombe, former VP of Audit and Chief Audit Executive at Lyft.

Brian Roberts, a16z general partner, Petual board member, and former CFO at Lyft and Splunk, commended Petual's early success in engaging large enterprise customers, citing it as a testament to the compelling market opportunity and the strength of the product. Petual is positioned as an AI-powered audit and compliance platform that drives organizations towards AI-native audit functions. By integrating agentic AI into control testing, Petual facilitates operational efficiency improvements, enhanced audit quality, and scalability.