Midship, an AI-native platform automating Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) testing and internal audit workflows, has announced $4.15 million in seed funding led by Costanoa Ventures, with participation from Seguin Ventures and additional angel investors. The funding will be used to scale its team and accelerate adoption among public companies facing rising audit complexity, talent shortages, and mounting compliance costs.
The average U.S. public company spends roughly $2.3 million annually on SOX audit services, with an estimated 10x more in hidden costs by internal teams across finance, IT, and operations. Despite decades of tooling, SOX testing remains largely manual, tying up internal audit teams in repetitive evidence collection, testing, and documentation rather than higher-value advisory work.
Midship’s agentic AI takes on the full SOX testing lifecycle. The platform’s agents follow audit plans, reason over complex enterprise documentation, perform control testing, and generate audit-ready work papers, delivering a complete evidence trail that reduces manual effort while keeping human auditors firmly in the loop.
Founded by Kieran Taylor (CEO), Aahel Iyer (CPO), and Max Maio (CTO), Midship was born out of the team’s firsthand experience navigating SOX audits at scale. The founders supported audit and compliance teams at companies including Instacart, Deloitte, Amazon, Lyft, Faire, and PayPal, before ultimately coming together as a product trio at Dashworks (acquired by HubSpot). While preparing Instacart for its IPO, the team experienced the full burden of first-year SOX compliance, sparking an internal AI hackathon that uncovered a larger opportunity: automating the entire SOX testing lifecycle.
“SOX was meant to address core risk, not bog audit teams down with busy work,” said Kieran Taylor, CEO and co-founder of Midship. “Teams spend months proving controls work instead of improving how the business runs. Midship flips that equation by letting AI handle the execution, evidence, and documentation, so humans can focus on judgment and real risk.”
Midship differentiates itself from legacy SOX platforms by going beyond workflow management. While systems of record like AuditBoard and Workiva track the administration of a SOX program, Midship automates the actual testing itself. Unlike deterministic automation tools, Midship’s fully agentic approach can handle the real-world variability and unstructured data inherent in enterprise audit work.
“While most ‘AI for audit’ tools focus on replacing individual tasks,” said Amy Cheetham, Partner at Costanoa. “Midship goes further by enabling agents to execute end to end testing across entire audit programs. This lets teams keep controls in their native audit language and allow the agents to determine the steps needed to complete the work.”
Midship is already being used by leading public companies, including a top social media platform and major fintechs, helping internal audit teams reduce manual effort and scale their impact without growing headcount.
To learn more, visit www.midship.ai.
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Tags: agentic ai, funding, SOX, Technology
