Andera announced that it has raised a $37 million Series A round led by Lightspeed. Andera is building an AI-native platform designed to automate internal audit workflows, including evidence collection, control testing, and workpaper generation.
Lightspeed said it invested in Andera after spending several months developing a thesis around audit automation and speaking with finance and audit leaders across Fortune 500 companies, Big Four partners, former PCAOB officials, and industry practitioners.
The firm said internal audit has not been meaningfully reimagined in decades, even as public companies spend thousands of hours collecting evidence, testing controls, and producing workpapers. Much of that work continues to be done manually and in spreadsheets.
Lightspeed noted that the audit function has become more consequential as businesses have grown more complex. What was historically viewed as a SOX and compliance function has become a critical internal line of defense for investor protection and enterprise integrity.
The investment thesis centers on the idea that audit is a reasoning problem rather than a rules problem. Auditors need to review complex evidence across multiple formats, determine whether it satisfies a control objective, and produce documentation that can withstand regulatory scrutiny.
Lightspeed said the convergence of large language model reasoning, long context windows, and agentic tool use has created an opportunity to automate audit work in ways that previous rule-based systems could not.
Andera’s platform is designed to automate control testing end-to-end across SOX, operational, compliance, and other control categories. The company’s system processes large volumes of financial evidence across Excel workbooks, PDFs, screenshots, journal entries, and other documentation to identify relevant materials and support audit judgments.
The company’s long-term vision is to support the documentation, assessment, and testing of any control regardless of industry, complexity, or system.
Andera’s architecture includes a custom engine that can read, process, and write back into Excel dynamically, reflecting how auditors work within financial workpapers. The platform also uses proprietary agentic retrieval, probabilistic beam search, and specialized agents designed to handle financial workpapers with the precision required for large enterprise customers.
Andera was founded by CEO Aryo Patel and CTO Tinah Hong. Patel previously worked at Microsoft on Azure infrastructure scaling and at Jane Street on the trading desk. Hong previously worked at Stripe on machine learning systems and at Microsoft as a software engineer.
The company has also built a team with audit and risk expertise. Carina Averilla, Andera’s first hire, previously worked as a Deloitte auditor and served as Head of U.S. Accounting at Revolut. Jared Lauber, who leads partnerships, has spent 30 years as a risk and audit leader at organizations including EY, Instacart, McKesson, and Williams-Sonoma.
Lightspeed said Andera’s platform can give audit professionals more time to focus on higher-value work, including identifying enterprise risks, improving controls, and helping organizations make better decisions.
The firm said Andera is more than a tool that assists with audit. Instead, it described the platform as AI that works alongside audit teams and is calibrated to each enterprise’s risk appetite, control environment, and strategic context.
