Audit is meant to be creative. We're bringing it back with agentic AI.

Petual has raised $20 million to move audit from process-heavy work to judgment. Our raise includes a $17M round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and a $3.2M round led by First Round, with participation from Cowboy Ventures, Elad Gil, the founders of Lyft, Opendoor, and more.

I want to take a moment to talk about why we built Petual, and what we believe about the future of audit.

Efficiency in SOX testing will free up time for creativity.

Audit is a deeply creative function. At its core, it's about understanding how a business actually works: what defines its risks, and whether controls meaningfully mitigate those risks. That requires context, judgment, curiosity, and a wide range of domain knowledge.

But that's not how most audit teams spend their time.

After thousands of hours with our customers we've seen a consistent pattern: even the best teams are stuck in mechanical work, leaving little room for the creative, judgement-heavy work that actually matters.

The Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act of 2002 is one of the primary drivers of the mechanical and inefficient reality of audit today. SOX was written into law with the right goals in mind. In the wake of Enron and Worldcom, public markets needed consistency and standards for financial reporting. SOX delivers that, but at a cost. The most operationally intensive part of SOX is Section 404: the assessment and attestation of the design / effectiveness of internal controls. In practice, that means auditors wade through hundreds of support files per control test (PDFs, Excel workbooks, screenshots) just to determine whether a control operated correctly. Add the overhead of mapping, testing, and documentation, and it's no surprise that tens of millions of hours are spent on SOX every year. Well over $8B is spent annually on SOX alone in the US market alone.

This is exactly the kind of work that screams for automation – and why we're building Petual: to bring the focus back to judgment and to shift the time allocation back to the creative.

To date, we've modeled that Petual provides customers (which include S&P 500 listed companies and several of the NASDAQ 100) with 68–80% efficiency gains on current SOX workflows. The net effect is more time for teams to focus on higher-judgment work: investments in scoping and operational control definition, analysis or remediation.

SOX is just the beginning.

While we're starting with an intense focus on bringing agents to SOX testing, agentic AI can transform much more within the internal audit function: scoping and planning, operational audit, risk and controls mapping, and eventually continuous monitoring and anomaly detection. With the new capital raised, we are even better equipped to build new products while continuing to invest in the SOX platform our customers rely on today.

We believe the internal audit function will scale through a careful partnership between human judgement and AI execution, with Petual as the infrastructure powering that future.

We're grateful to our investors for believing in this vision alongside us.

If you're in audit or compliance and want to see what Petual looks like in practice, we'd love to talk .