Why We Invested in Midship: Automating SOX Testing with Agentic AI

Some of the most valuable opportunities in enterprise software hide in plain sight – the back-office processes that quietly drain time, talent and capital each year. Internal audit and SOX compliance fall squarely into that category.

Every public company, and many large private companies, have to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX). Yet, despite decades of tooling, SOX testing remains largely manual. Internal audit teams spend months coordinating with finance, engineering, IT, and operations to collect evidence, test controls, and assemble documentation. External auditors then repeat much of that work, often at enormous cost, with customers spending millions on BPOs and software. 

Midship is changing that, making audits faster and smarter while giving teams back their time, leverage, and confidence. Today, we’re excited to lead Midship’s Seed round. 

Reducing Cross-Functional Spend on Audits

Midship is an AI-native platform that automates the full SOX testing lifecycle. AI agents collect evidence, perform control testing, and generate audit-ready workpapers end to end, while keeping human auditors firmly in the loop.

Midship’s agents collapse weeks of manual coordination into minutes across multiple functions in the organization. While internal audit owns the process, Midship also increases productivity across finance, engineering, and compliance. Today, SOX testing requires coordination among system owners (e.g., IT), control owners (finance), and testers (audit). Each round involves manual evidence collection, spreadsheet sampling, and document routing. 

Heads of Internal Audit desperately need better software to reduce said burden. One customer described Midship as an “Iron Man suit” for internal audit leaders. Across audit, Midship offers potentially valuable network effects. The more organizations run their SOX processes through Midship, the more it can provide them with best practices across public companies – and begin to inform audit teams on how to perform tests and run controls.

Built by Control Owners and Audit Experts

The Midship team understands SOX because they’ve lived it. As a control owner in engineering at Instacart before their IPO, CEO Kieran Taylor experienced evidence collection first hand. He led the internal audit initiative to build a "single pane of glass" permissions system and recognized how hard it was to coordinate among the different functions required. We love both their drive to build amazing products, and their customer obsession.

The founders have built products 0-1 together at Dashworks; and individually at Instacart (Kieran Taylor), PayPal (Max Maio) and Faire (Aahel Iyer), all of which combined to inform their technical background to create a robust AI infrastructure for audit. 

Midship is already being used by leading public companies, including a top social media platform, major fintechs, and a Fortune 500 insurer. Internal auditors rave about Midship’s deep understanding of the audit complexity, and its ability to create full audit workpapers in a fraction of the time. When auditors go out of their way to advocate for software, you know it’s solving a real problem.

From Spot Checks to Continuous Confidence

Audit software is a crowded space, but most platforms stop at workflow management. Incumbents like AuditBoard and Workiva track SOX programs but still require testing, evidence evaluation, and documentation be done manually.

We believe Midship can become the infrastructure layer for continuous monitoring, helping teams understand what good looks like across controls, across companies, and across audit cycles. As more organizations run their SOX processes through the platform, Midship will surface benchmarks and best practices for how controls are designed, tested, and maintained. These powerful network effects can move audit from reactive compliance to proactive risk management.

Audit built for how modern companies operate

SOX compliance may not be flashy, but it is foundational. It affects every public company, costs millions annually, and yet remains deeply underserved by modern software.

We’re proud to partner with Kieran, Max, and Aahel as they build the future of internal audit and SOX compliance. This is a huge market, a forgotten pain point, and a team uniquely equipped to win.