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Arden

AI agents that automate SOX control testing.

Arden is the AI-native platform for internal audit and SOX teams. We build AI agents that automatically pull evidence from your stack, test controls end-to-end, and produce audit-ready workpapers in minutes instead of weeks. Internal audit is a massive but underserved market. Every public company in the US is required to do SOX testing, yet teams still run it through spreadsheets and screenshots. Arden is the engine that does this work.
Active Founders
Aryaman Khanna
Aryaman Khanna
Founder
Co-Founder & CEO @ Arden. Previously worked on AI @ Databricks and studied CS & Data Science @ UC Berkeley. Co-authored NeurIPS 2025 research on privacy-preserving ML for autonomous systems.
David Lomelin
David Lomelin
Founder
Co-Founder & CTO @ Arden. Previously AI @ MIT and co-founder of Blueprint. Conducted research at MIT CSAIL and DUSP on LLM post-training and applied AI systems.
Company Launches
Arden: AI-native platform for audit teams
See original launch post

Hey everyone!

We're Aryaman and David, co-founders of Arden.

TL;DR: Arden is the AI-native platform for audit and SOX teams.

Ask: Intros to VPs of Internal Audit / CAEs at public tech companies. founders@ardentech.ai or ardentech.ai

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgOVq8En4yg&feature=youtu.be

The Problem

Internal audit still runs on spreadsheets and screenshots.

Every year, audit teams test hundreds of controls to prove the company's financials are trustworthy. For each one, someone spends weeks chasing colleagues for evidence buried in 20+ disconnected systems and manually testing in Excel. They do the same work every quarter.

SOX compliance costs almost $2M a year at a public company, and 70%+ of that is labor. Teams outsource the overflow to consulting firms at $500-1,000 an hour and burn another seven figures.

The tools that exist today store the workpapers, but don’t do the work.

The Solution

Arden is the AI-native platform that runs audit tests end-to-end.

  1. Plugs into your stack. Connects to your control library, source systems, and past audit data. Learns how your team audits, and builds that knowledge over time
  2. Gathers evidence from every system. Computer-use AI agents navigate legacy systems and capture the screenshots external auditors require. Direct integrations pull from your modern stack, saving auditors weeks of back and forth.
  3. Chases down control owners for you. A Slack/Teams agent follows up with control owners, saving auditors weeks of back and forth. Our agent has the right context already filled in, so control owners just confirm.
  4. Runs control tests. Arden’s testing engine supports full-population or sample-based testing. It catches every exception and flags them for review.
  5. Produces workpapers ready for external auditors. Every conclusion ties back to the source evidence, with full traceability into how Arden reached it.

Audit work hasn't changed in 30 years even as the systems in scope have doubled. We’re rebuilding audit from the ground up.

The Team

Aryaman and David have been best friends since 6th grade. Aryaman studied CS at Berkeley and David studied AI at MIT, and we’ve done research on LLM reliability (and a million other projects) together.

Our Ask

If you can intro us to any of the following, we'd love it:

  • VPs of Internal Audit, CAEs, or SOX directors at public companies
  • CFOs or Controllers at public or pre-IPO companies
  • Anyone at a Big 4 or mid-tier firm doing co-sourced SOX work

founders@ardentech.ai or book a demo at ardentech.ai

Arden
Founded:2026
Batch:Spring 2026
Team Size:2
Status:
Active
Location:San Francisco
Primary Partner:David Lieb