Comp AI turns compliance headaches into a $34M Series A – Refresh Miami

Compliance software is not exactly known for moving fast. Comp AI, apparently, did not get the memo.

The Miami-based startup has gone from its January 2025 founding to more than 1,000 customers, 15x year-over-year ARR growth, and now a $34 million Series A in less than two years.

The round, announced today, was led by Coconut Grove-based Roo Capital and Grand Ventures. Comp AI plans to use the fresh capital to push beyond the compliance automation market where it got its start and into a much bigger target: continuous cybersecurity.

It is a sizable leap for a company that was, not long ago, operating on a very different scale.

“When I first visited Comp AI in New York, the team was four people working out of a single room,” Nathan Owen, General Partner at Grand Ventures, said in a statement. “Since then, an increasing number of our own portfolio companies have left other compliance platforms out of frustration and moved to Comp AI, and every one of them raved about both the process and the result.”

Comp AI was founded by CEO Lewis Carhart, COO Claudio Fuentes, and CTO Mariano Fuentes around a problem familiar to just about any startup trying to sell into large companies: security compliance can become a painful, labor-heavy process right when a company is trying to grow.

The first wave of compliance software helped move that work away from spreadsheets and consultants. Comp AI’s pitch is that AI agents can now take the next step, doing more of the actual work rather than simply helping humans organize it.

Its platform uses AI agents to handle tasks including onboarding, policy and risk generation, evidence gathering, control monitoring, and vendor assessments. The company says that can help software businesses achieve compliance in days rather than quarters.

“The first generation of compliance software proved this process could be automated. Agentic AI lets us go much further,” Carhart said. “Security software shouldn’t just track the work. It should understand the business, perform the work, and act as risk changes.”

That thesis has already found customers well outside the traditional software startup crowd. Comp AI now works with companies across healthcare, financial services, higher education, and professional services, alongside tech customers including Corgi, Dub, OpenCode, Inference, and Primer.

But compliance is increasingly looking like the starting point rather than the final destination.

Comp AI is now building AI agents designed to continuously monitor and validate security controls, test applications and infrastructure, and respond as risks change. The idea is to replace the periodic security snapshot with something closer to a live feed.

That becomes more relevant as AI itself speeds up how quickly software gets built and changed. More code, released faster, means security systems have less time to catch up.

“Historically, compliance has been an approximation of security because so much of the work could only be performed manually and periodically,” Claudio Fuentes said. “Agentic AI changes that constraint. Work that once required teams of people can increasingly happen continuously in software.”

Investors appear convinced that the timing is right. “AI is changing the security and compliance landscape quickly, and businesses can no longer afford to treat compliance as an annual box-checking exercise,” said Roo Capital Principal Varun Sridhar. Sridhar’s firm saw an opportunity for Comp AI to “define this category,” while Grand Ventures’ Owen pointed to the startup’s customer growth as evidence that the market is already pulling it in that direction.

And the company itself is getting considerably bigger. Comp AI said its team has grown 10x year over year and plans to hire across product, engineering, operations, sales, customer success, and marketing at its Miami headquarters and New York office.

The $34 million will also fund product and engineering work as Comp AI moves upmarket toward larger organizations with more complex security needs.

For a startup that began by trying to make compliance less painful, the ambition has expanded quickly. Comp AI now wants its software to do something much harder: spot security problems, test whether defenses are actually working, and take action as the situation changes.

“As models become more capable, we can move beyond software that simply records whether security work happened toward software that can execute and verify that work,” Mariano Fuentes said.

Pictured above: Comp AI co-founders, from left to right: Mariano Fuentes, CTO; Lewis Carhart, CEO; Claudio Fuentes, COO.

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