Andera, an AI-native platform focused on automating internal audit operations, has secured $37 million in Series A funding in a round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.
The investment reflects Lightspeed’s belief that the audit industry is entering a significant phase of AI-driven transformation. Before making its investment, the venture capital firm spent months researching the sector, consulting finance and audit executives from Fortune 500 companies across technology, financial services, healthcare, and consumer industries. It also engaged with partners from major accounting firms and former officials from the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB).
Following its research, Lightspeed identified a strong opportunity for innovation driven by two key trends: the emergence of advanced large language models capable of managing complex audit processes and increasing pressure from chief financial officers to deliver productivity improvements of 200% to 300% within back-office functions.
Andera’s platform automates end-to-end control testing across a wide range of audit categories, including SOX, operational, and compliance controls. The system can evaluate everything from user access provisioning to complex management review controls and bad debt reserve assessments. It processes vast amounts of financial evidence from multiple sources, including Excel files, PDFs, system screenshots, and journal entries.
At the heart of the platform is a proprietary agentic retrieval engine designed to identify and retrieve relevant evidence across billions of tokens while avoiding the recall limitations commonly associated with traditional vector-retrieval systems. The platform also incorporates probabilistic beam search technology to focus computational resources on areas with higher uncertainty, along with specialized AI agents capable of interacting accurately with financial workpapers. Looking ahead, Andera aims to expand its capabilities to document, assess, and test virtually any type of control regardless of industry, complexity, or underlying technology systems.
The company was founded by CEO Aryo Patel and CTO Tinah Hong. Patel previously worked on Azure infrastructure scaling projects at Microsoft and later served on the trading desk at Jane Street, where he developed a perspective on audit challenges centered around advanced reasoning rather than infrastructure alone. Hong, who has known Patel since their school years in Chicago and later studied with him at MIT, previously developed machine learning systems at Stripe and worked as a software engineer at Microsoft.
The founding team has also added experienced industry professionals. Andera’s first employee, Carina Averilla, is a former Deloitte auditor and previously led U.S. accounting operations at Revolut. Jared Lauber, who oversees partnerships, brings more than 30 years of audit and risk management experience gained at organizations including EY, Instacart, McKesson, and Williams-Sonoma.
The platform is designed to help audit professionals spend less time on repetitive and operational tasks, particularly during demanding audit periods. By automating evidence collection, control testing, and workpaper preparation, Andera seeks to enable auditors to focus on higher-value activities such as identifying enterprise risks, uncovering growth opportunities, and supporting strategic decision-making.
According to the company, the technology is intended to enhance the capabilities of audit professionals rather than replace them, allowing teams to extend their coverage across the enterprise and address a broader range of risks more effectively.
