Petual is Making Audit Creative with Agentic AI

Petual, delivering audit testing results from any dataset in minutes, with better than human precision, led by Snir Kodesh, Eliot Walker, and the team, has raised $20 million which 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.

Efficiency in SOX Testing

Audit is inherently a creative function, focused on understanding business risks and evaluating whether controls effectively address them, requiring judgment, context, and domain expertise.

In practice, however, audit teams spend most of their time on repetitive, mechanical tasks, limiting their ability to focus on higher-value, insight-driven work.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, introduced after the Enron and WorldCom collapses, established critical standards for financial reporting, but also introduced heavy operational burdens. Its most intensive requirement, Section 404, forces auditors to review hundreds of documents per control, making SOX compliance highly manual, time-consuming, and costly, exceeding $8B annually in the U.S.

This is precisely the problem Petual targets, automating repetitive workflows to shift focus back to judgment-driven work. Early results show 68–80% efficiency gains, enabling teams, including those at S&P 500 and NASDAQ-100 companies, to focus on higher-value analysis, scoping, and remediation.

Beyond SOX

While the initial focus is SOX testing, agentic AI has the potential to transform the broader internal audit function, from scoping and planning to operational audits, risk mapping, continuous monitoring, and anomaly detection.

With new funding, Petual is expanding beyond SOX while continuing to strengthen its core platform. The long-term vision centers on combining human judgment with AI execution, positioning Petual as the infrastructure for the future of internal audit.