The company looks to automate control testing for Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) regulations and internal audits.

Petual, an AI-powered audit and compliance platform, raised $20 million in funding. Andreessen Horowitz led the round, with participation from First Round Capital, Cowboy Ventures, and Elad Gil. The company said the capital will be used to accelerate product development and expand go-to-market efforts.

SOX mandates that all public companies adhere to specific financial reporting, security, and audit requirements to minimize corporate fraud. The platform uses agentic AI to alleviate the workload of manual processes associated with SOX compliance reporting and internal control audits. 

Petual’s platform ingests both structured and unstructured data to automate these processes, producing auditor-ready workpapers faster than manual processes. The system shows how it reached its conclusions by linking them to the original documents and formats everything for external auditors to review. A built-in review workflow helps to maintain human oversight.

According to the company, early customers reported efficiency gains of 68% to 80% in SOX-related workflows. Petual’s customers include companies across sectors such as energy, financial services, software, and manufacturing, as well as firms in the S&P 500 and NASDAQ 100.

The funding reflects growing enterprise interest in applying AI to governance, risk, and compliance functions, particularly in areas where auditability, documentation, and regulatory alignment are core requirements.