Hg-backed Optro, the cloud-based audit, risk, and compliance management platform that was formerly known as AuditBoard, said May 6 that it has acquired Midship, an AI-native SOX automation solution.
Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.
Optro says this strategic move delivers highly governed, enterprise-grade AI agents to its customers and prospects, providing immediate business value.
Midship will be fully integrated into Optro’s Controls Management solution, providing controls testing and SOX compliance workflows, with localization and support for global enterprises. This integration combines Midship’s autonomous testing with Optro’s recently announced capabilities, including AI Narratives and Flowcharts, Fieldwork Automations, and Continuous Control Monitoring, officials say.
“Internal audit is under increasing pressure to deliver more with less, with only 23% of audit teams seeing budget increases and 19 percent facing cuts, according to The IIA’s 2026 North American Pulse of Internal Audit Survey,” Optro said in a media release. “Midship’s acquisition and integration with Optro provides a critical solution to these challenges. By automating high-volume, repetitive processes, Optro’s platform allows internal auditors to shift their focus from manual control checks to strategic, high-value risk analysis. It also provides the foundation for Optro’s alliance partners’ agents to begin communicating seamlessly with Optro’s agents.”
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In a statement, Optro CEO Raul Villar Jr. said, “Global enterprises shouldn’t have to choose between cutting-edge innovation and the stability of a trusted partner. We moved internal audit from spreadsheets to the cloud, and now we are leveraging agentic AI to transform the function from tactical and manual to strategic and automated. By embedding the market’s leading agentic SOX solution directly into Optro’s system of action, we are delivering the next generation of AI to our customers.”
Founded in 2024 by a team of veteran AI builders and backed by Y Combinator, Midship reinvents the controls testing process from the ground up, using agentic AI to automate manual processes auditors have been tasked with for decades, increasing the strategic value of the audit function in the process.
Midship announced earlier this year a $4.15 million seed round led by Costanoa Ventures, with participation from Seguin Ventures and additional angel investors.
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CEO Kieran Taylor, a former internal audit technologist at Deloitte and Instacart, and his two co-founders, Aahel Iyer and Max Maio, will join the Optro product team, where they will continue to build innovative agentic solutions.
“The Midship team has spent countless hours with internal auditors, both before and after Midship existed, understanding the pain they face,” Taylor said in a statement. “We are thrilled to integrate our agentic capabilities into Optro’s platform to help teams across the globe automate the heavy lifting of controls testing.”
According to Optro, key capabilities immediately available to customers as a result of the deal with Midship include:
- Unstructured data ingestion: Processing raw, unstandardized evidence exactly as a human auditor would.
- Autonomous test execution: Running attribute tests, such as access reviews and bank reconciliations, directly across uploaded evidence.
- Workpaper generation: Compiling audit-ready Excel workpapers in formats specifically designed for external auditor expectations.
“As an Optro customer, I’m excited to see their investment in this transformative technology,” Michael Rich, senior director of internal audit at grocery store chain Albertsons and member of Optro’s Customer Advisory Board, said in a statement. “The combination of Midship’s agentic capabilities with Optro’s system of action realizes the full potential of AI, allowing internal audit teams to automate repetitive tasks and focus on strategic work.”
Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton LLP acted as legal advisor to Optro, and Kirkland & Ellis LLP acted as legal advisor to Midship in connection with the transaction.
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