Petual, an AI-powered audit and compliance platform, has secured $20m in fresh funding.
The investment round was led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with participation from First Round Capital, Cowboy Ventures and Elad Gil.
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Petual intends to allocate the funding to speed up product development and support its go-to-market activities.
The company’s platform applies agentic AI to Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) procedures and internal audit work, which are regarded as the “most resource-intensive and manual processes in public enterprises”.
The use of AI technology automates evidence collection and work paper preparation at enterprise scale.
The system can handle both structured and unstructured inputs including screenshots, PDF documents and Excel files, and then generate work papers, the company said.
Petual added that its outputs include detailed reasoning linked back to source documents, formatted to match external auditor templates and expectations.
The product also includes a built-in review and approval flow so that human oversight remains embedded in the audit process.
Petual claims customers are seeing efficiency improvements of roughly 68–80% on existing SOX workflows.
Early adopters of its technology include companies in the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq 100 across industries including energy, software, infrastructure, manufacturing and financial services, according to the company.
Petual board member and a16z general partner Brian Roberts said: “It is 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 have built.”
