Petual Raises $20M in Funding

Petual brings agentic AI to SOX testing and internal audit, enabling automated evidence collection and work paper creation at enterprise scale. It processes both structured and unstructured data like screenshots, PDFs and Excel files to generate complete work papers in minutes, instead of the many hours typically required for manual work.

The platform produces outputs that match external auditor requirements and include clear, traceable reasoning linked back to source documents. It also includes a built-in review workflow so humans remain in control through the approval process.

The team behind Petual has strong experience in AI, risk, audit, and engineering, with backgrounds at companies like Stripe, Retool, Lyft, and the Big Four firms. Before founding Petual, CEO Snir Kodesh led engineering at Retool. The team also includes Eliot Walker, former CTO at Lyft Fleet, and David Coulombe, former VP of Audit and Chief Audit Executive at Lyft.

Today, Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance and internal audits are highly manual and time-consuming for public companies. Auditors must review large volumes of unstructured files, gather and analyze evidence, run tests, and create documentation for each control—work that is repeated every year and leaves little time for higher-value risk management tasks. In the U.S. alone, companies spend over $8 billion annually on SOX compliance.

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"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," said Brian Roberts, a16z general partner, Petual board member, and former CFO at Lyft and Splunk.

"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," said Petual customer Erin Dempsey Heuwetter, Head of Audit, Risk and Compliance at Navan.

Eos Energy customer Sumeet Puri, Chief Accounting Officer added, "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."

About Petual

Founded in 2024, by Snir Kodesh, Petual is an AI powered audit and compliance platform that brings AI into control testing. It helps companies improve audit quality, work more efficiently and scale their audit and compliance processes.

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