Petual, an AI-powered platform for audit and compliance, has raised $20 million from Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, and Cowboy Ventures, among others, to transform internal audit and SOX teams into AI-native functions, beginning with control test automation.

SAN FRANCISCO, April 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Petual, an AI-powered platform for audit and compliance, today announced it has raised $20 million from Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, Cowboy Ventures, and Elad Gil. The new capital will be used to accelerate product development and go-to-market.

Today, Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance and internal audit are among the most resource-intensive and manual processes in public enterprises. Auditors are required to wade through hundreds of unstructured files per control, collecting, enriching and reasoning through evidence, performing tests, and generating documentation. This work repeats year-over-year and leaves little room for risk management activities that demand auditor judgement and stakeholder engagement. Well over $8B is spent annually on SOX in the US market alone.

Petual's platform brings agentic AI to SOX testing and internal audit, making autonomous execution of evidence gathering and work paper generation possible for the first time at enterprise scale. The platform ingests both structured and unstructured evidence such as screenshots, PDFs, and Excel files to generate complete work papers in minutes, compared to the double or triple-digit hours spent manually by most teams today. Its outputs are formatted to meet external auditor expectations and templates, with detailed reasoning traceable to source documents. A built-in review workflow supports the approval chain, ensuring human oversight always remains central to the process.

Petual's customers can see efficiency gains of 68 to 80 percent on current SOX workflows. Early Petual customers include both S&P 500 and NASDAQ 100 companies and span every industry: energy, software, infrastructure, manufacturing, financial services, and more.

"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."

The team behind Petual brings deep experience at the intersection of technology, AI, risk, and audit. They've built internal audit teams and engineering organizations alike, with backgrounds spanning Stripe, Retool, Lyft, and the Big Four. Before founding Petual, Founder and CEO Snir Kodesh led engineering at Retool. The team also includes leaders like Eliot Walker, former CTO of Fleet at Lyft, and David Coulombe, former VP of Audit and Chief Audit Executive at Lyft.

"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.

About Petual Petual is an AI-powered audit and compliance platform that helps drive toward AI-native audit functions. By bringing agentic AI into control testing, Petual enables organizations to operate more efficiently, improve audit quality, and scale. Learn more at petual.ai.

Andreessen Horowitz Andreessen Horowitz (aka a16z) is a venture capital firm that backs bold entrepreneurs building the future through technology. We are stage agnostic: We invest in seed to venture to growth-stage technology companies, across bio + healthcare, consumer and enterprise apps, crypto, fintech, infrastructure, and companies building toward American dynamism. a16z has over $90B under management across multiple funds.

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SOURCE Petual, Inc