Optro (formerly AuditBoard), the AI-powered GRC platform empowering enterprises to transform risk into opportunity, has announced the acquisition of Midship, the industry’s premier AI-native SOX automation solution. This strategic move immediately delivers highly governed, enterprise-grade AI agents to Optro’s customers and prospects, providing immediate business value and representing a significant milestone in delivering the first and only agentic system of action for GRC.
Internal audit is under increasing pressure to deliver more with less, with only 23 percent of audit teams seeing budget increases and 19 percent facing cuts, according to The IIA’s 2026 North American Pulse of Internal Audit Survey. Midship’s acquisition and integration with Optro provides a critical solution to these challenges. By automating high-volume, repetitive processes, Optro’s platform allows internal auditors to shift their focus from manual control checks to strategic, high-value risk analysis. It also provides the foundation for Optro’s alliance partners’ agents to begin communicating seamlessly with Optro’s agents.
“Global enterprises shouldn’t have to choose between cutting-edge innovation and the stability of a trusted partner,” said Raul Villar Jr., CEO of Optro. “We moved internal audit from spreadsheets to the cloud, and now we are leveraging agentic AI to transform the function from tactical and manual to strategic and automated. By embedding the market’s leading agentic SOX solution directly into Optro’s system of action, we are delivering the next generation of AI to our customers.”
Founded in 2024 by a team of veteran AI builders and backed by Y Combinator, Midship reinvents the controls testing process from the ground up, using agentic AI to automate manual processes auditors have been tasked with for decades, increasing the strategic value of the audit function in the process. Midship was co-founded by CEO Kieran Taylor, a former internal audit technologist at Deloitte and Instacart, whose firsthand experience building SOX compliance technology during the IPO while at Instacart sparked the vision for using agentic AI to solve audit bottlenecks. Taylor and his two co-founders, Aahel Iyer and Max Maio, will join the Optro product team, where they will continue to build innovative agentic solutions.
“The Midship team has spent countless hours with internal auditors, both before and after Midship existed, understanding the pain they face,” said Kieran Taylor, CEO and co-founder at Midship. “We are thrilled to integrate our agentic capabilities into Optro’s platform to help teams across the globe automate the heavy lifting of controls testing.”
Midship will be fully integrated into Optro’s Controls Management solution, providing controls testing and SOX compliance workflows, with localisation and support for global enterprises. This integration combines Midship’s autonomous testing with Optro’s recently announced capabilities, including AI Narratives and Flowcharts, Fieldwork Automations, and Continuous Control Monitoring.
Key capabilities immediately available to customers include:
- Unstructured Data Ingestion: Processing raw, unstandardised evidence exactly as a human auditor would.
- Autonomous Test Execution: Running attribute tests, such as access reviews and bank reconciliations, directly across uploaded evidence.
- Workpaper Generation: Compiling audit-ready Excel workpapers in formats specifically designed for external auditor expectations.
This acquisition is a major step toward realising Optro’s vision of an AI-powered GRC system of action, with enterprise-grade, governed agents for compliance, cybersecurity, and risk management teams coming soon. It follows Optro’s recent rebranding and the acquisition of FairNow, a purpose-built AI Governance solution, further cementing its position as a global pacesetter in GRC innovation.
Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton LLP acted as legal advisor to Optro, and Kirkland & Ellis LLP acted as legal advisor to Midship in connection with the transaction.
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