Backing Andera as it Rebuilds the Future of Audit and Compliance

After leading Andera’s seed round, we’re doubling down in the company’s $37 million Series A, led by Lightspeed and joined by Bain Capital Ventures.

Obsessing over SOX

We first met Aryo Patel and Tinah Hong in October 2024, when Andera was just two months old. What immediately stood out was the unlikely problem they had chosen to tackle. It is rare to meet two MIT-trained engineers, one a recent graduate and the other a recent dropout, who are genuinely obsessed with SOX and audit.

Most people do not know what the Sarbanes-Oxley Act is, let alone want to spend the next decade building around it. Aryo had studied public company risk as a quantitative trader and understood that the quality of a company’s internal controls was a signal investors should care about. Tinah had built machine learning infrastructure at Stripe and Microsoft and understood how quickly emerging agent capabilities could transform complex work.

Aryo and Tinah had known each other since they were 11, attending middle school, high school, and MIT together. They saw an opportunity to reinvent a massive labor-intensive function using a new generation of AI systems. Before incorporating the company, they spoke with more than 150 auditors and immersed themselves in every step of the work.

A Market Ready for Reinvention

This was also a problem space we knew well. With a two-time public company CEO and two former CFOs on the A* team, we had experienced the pain of SOX firsthand and had been looking for founders capable of rebuilding the category.

Our thesis was straightforward. Every U.S. public company must prove the integrity of its financial controls each year, even as the supply of CPAs and internal auditors continues to shrink. Meanwhile, the incumbent software remained largely a collection of repositories and checklists.

The overall market opportunity is massive ($200B+) with many workflows repetitive and manual, making them ideally suited for AI automation (while letting auditors do more important work that still requires human judgment). Two weeks after meeting Aryo and Tinah, we led their seed round.

Building the AI Auditor

From the beginning, Aryo and Tinah understood that automating SOX work would require real technical innovation. This was not a matter of putting a new interface on top of an existing model.

Andera’s agents execute control tests from beginning to end. They automatically fetch evidence from hundreds of different sources, parse through thousands of Excel files, PDFs, emails, and more, and produce workpapers in formats auditors already use. All this is done while providing auditors visibility into everything the AI did so they can trust it with their most sensitive data. From the earliest days, the company has focused on hiring exceptional AI engineers and building systems capable of performing reliable, important work.

Today, Andera’s AI auditor is deployed with Fortune 500 companies and public accounting firms, reducing control testing costs by as much as 70%. But the opportunity extends well beyond control testing. The team has been investing heavily in generalized out-of-distribution data interpretation, allowing their agents to be applied to the broader universes of internal audit, risk assessment, financial compliance, and assurance. Aryo and Tinah’s ambition remains the same one they articulated at seed: to build an agentic platform capable of performing the work of today’s largest audit and advisory firms.

We’re thrilled to continue backing them as they build the next generation of audit infrastructure.