The startup Comp AI, specializing in cybersecurity and regulatory compliance, has raised $34 million in a Series A round. The round was led by Roo Capital and Grand Ventures.
The company was founded in January last year by Lewis Carhart (CEO), Claudio Fuentes (COO), and his brother Mariano Fuentes (CTO). Claudio and Mariano had been building startups together for nearly ten years when they met Carhart and invited him to LeapAI – a workflow management platform. Claudio was the CEO and co-founder there, Carhart was the head of business development, and Mariano was a senior full-stack engineer. The project lasted about two years, reaching over a million users, but was shut down: the founders did not find "a compelling enough use case to justify further investment."
The experience at LeapAI inspired the idea for the new startup. Among other things, they encountered SOC 2. "It’s a very complicated process," Claudio said. "It took us several months during which we did everything manually, and all that time we were distracted from building the actual product." This time, Carhart took the lead as CEO – because the idea was his.
Comp AI is developing an agent-based platform for routine security and compliance tasks: AI agents help draft security policies and gather evidence for audits, while the platform continuously monitors compliance.
"For many development companies, security and compliance are directly tied to revenue," Carhart said in an interview with TechCrunch, citing the request for a SOC 2 report before a deal as an example. The software helps ensure compliance but does not replace independent audits and human oversight. "For example, an agent can create an action plan, but it still needs to be reviewed and approved by another person," Carhart said. "As agents take increasingly serious actions over time, the level of assurance and the need for human approval must correspondingly increase."
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