AI-native internal audit and SOX compliance platform
HQ: San Francisco, CA | Founded: 2026 | Employees: 2 | Stage: Pre-Seed | Website: https://www.arden.ai
Arden is an AI-native platform for internal audit and SOX compliance teams. It deploys autonomous AI agents that pull audit evidence from 20+ enterprise systems (Workday, Okta, NetSuite, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Azure AD, AWS, Snowflake, GitHub), run full-population control tests, and generate PCAOB AS 2201 and COSOC-aligned workpapers ready for external auditor review. Two modes of evidence collection: computer-use agents that navigate legacy web apps and ERP interfaces like a human auditor, plus direct API integrations for modern systems. Includes automated identity resolution, Slack/Teams control owner follow-up, and direct export to AuditBoard and Workiva. Founded in 2026 by Aryaman Khanna (CEO) and David Lomelin (CTO), best friends since 6th grade. Khanna worked on AI at Databricks and co-authored NeurIPS 2025 research. Lomelin researched AI at MIT CSAIL and co-founded Blueprint. YC P26. Raised $500K from Y Combinator. Onboarding takes ~1 hour.
Arden addresses a massive, regulated market: every US public company must perform SOX testing, costing $2M/year on average with 70%+ in labor costs. The founding team (Databricks AI + MIT CSAIL) has strong AI credibility. The dual approach of computer-use agents for legacy systems + API integrations for modern ones is a smart technical differentiator vs competitors that only support modern APIs. Very early stage (YC P26, just launched), but the problem is real and the willingness to pay is high.
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