Petual, an AI-powered audit and compliance platform, announced that it has raised $20 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, Cowboy Ventures, and Elad Gil. The company plans to use the funding to accelerate product development and expand its go-to-market efforts.
Petual is targeting one of the most resource-intensive functions in large enterprises, audit and compliance, particularly processes tied to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. These workflows often require auditors to sift through hundreds of unstructured documents per control, including PDFs, spreadsheets, and screenshots, to collect evidence, perform testing, and generate documentation. The work is highly repetitive, consumes significant time, and limits the ability of audit teams to focus on higher-value risk management and strategic oversight. In the United States alone, companies spend more than $8 billion annually on SOX compliance.
Petual’s platform introduces agentic AI to automate core components of audit workflows. It ingests structured and unstructured data, evaluates evidence, and generates complete work papers in minutes rather than the dozens or hundreds of hours typically required. The outputs are formatted to align with external auditor expectations, with traceable reasoning linked directly to source documents. The system also includes built-in review workflows to maintain human oversight and ensure compliance standards are met.
Early results from customers indicate efficiency gains ranging from 68% to 80% across existing SOX workflows. Petual is already working with large enterprises, including companies within the S&P 500 and NASDAQ 100, across sectors such as energy, software, infrastructure, manufacturing, and financial services.
The company was founded by Snir Kodesh, who previously led engineering at Retool. The broader team brings experience across companies including Stripe, Retool, and Lyft, along with backgrounds in audit and risk from large accounting firms. Leadership also includes Eliot Walker, former CTO of Fleet at Lyft, and David Coulombe, former VP of Audit and Chief Audit Executive at Lyft.
Petual aims to transform internal audit functions into AI-native operations, enabling organizations to improve audit quality while reducing manual workloads and scaling more efficiently.
KEY QUOTES
“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,”
Erin Dempsey Heuwetter, Head Of Audit, Risk And Compliance, Navan
“Strengthening audit execution while staying focused on risk is a priority for Eos. Petual’s AI agents help us accelerate audit testing in a disciplined way, allowing our team to focus on risk analysis and oversight.”
Sumeet Puri, Chief Accounting Officer, Eos Energy
“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,”
Brian Roberts, General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz
