Oxus: AI Automation for Modern Internal Audits

Oxus is an AI-powered platform designed to automate and modernize internal audit workflows for pre-IPO and public companies. Founded in 2025 and headquartered in San Francisco, Oxus is part of the Winter 2026 startup batch and operates with a compact, highly technical team of three founders. The company’s mission is straightforward but ambitious: eliminate the most painful, manual, and expensive parts of internal audits and replace them with fast, review-ready outputs generated in minutes.

Internal audits are a regulatory necessity for public companies, particularly those subject to SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley) requirements. Yet despite their importance, audits remain stuck in outdated workflows built around spreadsheets, screenshots, PDFs, and repetitive human review. Oxus positions itself as an AI-native alternative—one that doesn’t merely assist auditors, but fundamentally restructures how audits are scoped, documented, tested, and delivered.

By transforming hours or weeks of manual effort into automated outputs, Oxus enables audit teams to deliver more audits, faster, while dramatically reducing reliance on costly external firms.

Why Are Internal Audits Still So Manual and Expensive?

The internal audit function sits at the intersection of compliance, finance, operations, and technology. Public companies are required to prove that their financial reporting processes—from payments and procurement to system access and approvals—operate correctly and consistently. In theory, this ensures trust and transparency. In practice, it creates a massive operational burden.

Audit teams today spend weeks just determining what to audit. Scoping involves assessing risk across financial statements, sub-accounts, systems, and business units. This work is typically done manually, relying on meetings, subjective judgment, and historical documentation. Once scoping is complete, auditors meet with stakeholders to understand processes, then spend anywhere from five to fifteen hours translating meeting notes into flowcharts that visually represent how each process works.

Evidence collection is even more time-consuming. Auditors dig through spreadsheets, PDFs, screenshots, email threads, and system exports to locate proof that controls were executed correctly. Much of the work is repetitive: reviewing hundreds of access records, matching invoices to purchase orders, checking signatures across lengthy documents, or validating approvals for thousands of transactions.

Because internal teams often lack the capacity to handle this workload alone, companies outsource significant portions of audit work to accounting and consulting firms. These firms charge between $200 and $800 per hour, resulting in annual audit costs that can easily reach $300,000 to over $1 million. Despite the price, the underlying work remains slow, manual, and error-prone.

How Does Oxus Reimagine the Audit Process from the Ground Up?

Oxus approaches internal audits not as a documentation problem, but as an intelligence and automation problem. Instead of forcing auditors to manually assemble evidence and narratives, Oxus uses AI to ingest, interpret, and structure audit data at scale.

At the scoping stage, Oxus accelerates risk assessment by automatically surfacing higher-risk areas using both financial metrics and qualitative factors. Rather than relying solely on human judgment or static checklists, audit teams gain data-driven insight into where attention is most needed. This allows teams to focus resources on meaningful risks instead of spreading effort evenly across low-impact areas.

After stakeholder meetings, Oxus can generate and update process flowcharts within minutes. Instead of auditors spending hours converting notes into diagrams, the platform produces visual, structured representations of processes almost immediately. As processes evolve, those flowcharts can be updated without recreating documentation from scratch.

Evidence review is also fundamentally simplified. Oxus enables teams to locate and interpret information across disparate files and systems, reducing the need for manual searching and cross-referencing. By centralizing and contextualizing evidence, the platform helps auditors understand not just what happened, but how and why it happened.

What Makes Oxus Especially Powerful for SOX and Public Company Audits?

SOX audits are particularly demanding because they require repeatable, defensible proof that controls operate consistently over time. Oxus is built specifically with this reality in mind.

One of the platform’s core strengths is its ability to eliminate repetitive manual checks. Tasks that traditionally consume thousands of hours per year—such as reviewing large documents for signatures, matching transactional data, or validating system access for hundreds of employees—can be handled in bulk by Oxus. The platform performs large-scale comparisons and reviews simultaneously, rather than one item at a time.

Crucially, Oxus doesn’t just automate analysis; it produces reviewer-ready documentation. Outputs are labeled, traceable, and supported by clearly linked evidence, making them suitable for internal review and external auditors alike. This reduces back-and-forth, minimizes rework, and shortens audit cycles.

For public companies facing recurring audits year after year, these efficiencies compound. What was once a multi-month process can be completed in a fraction of the time, with significantly less stress on internal teams.

How Does Oxus Change the Economics of Internal Audits?

The financial implications of Oxus are as significant as the operational ones. By automating large portions of audit scoping, documentation, and testing, Oxus dramatically reduces the need for outsourced audit labor.

Instead of paying hundreds of dollars per hour to external firms for manual review, companies can rely on AI-generated outputs that are faster, more consistent, and easier to audit themselves. According to Oxus, teams using the platform can save millions in outsourcing fees while completing audits up to ten times faster.

This shift doesn’t just reduce costs—it gives audit teams back control. Internal auditors can spend more time analyzing risks, advising the business, and improving controls, rather than acting as human data processors. Over time, this elevates the role of internal audit from a compliance function to a strategic partner within the organization.

Who Are the Founders Behind Oxus and Why Does Their Background Matter?

Oxus was founded by three co-founders with deep technical and financial expertise, all of whom share an academic background from MIT. Their combined experience spans computer science, artificial intelligence, economics, finance, and real-world exposure to regulated financial systems.

Janet Liu, Co-founder and CEO, holds a Bachelor of Science from MIT in Computer Science, Economics, Data Science, and Finance. Prior to Oxus, she conducted digital payments research at the Federal Reserve and worked in investment strategy at D.E. Shaw. This background gives her firsthand insight into how financial systems operate under regulatory scrutiny and where inefficiencies arise.

Melinda Liu, Co-founder and COO, also earned a Bachelor of Science from MIT in Computer Science, Economics, Data Science, and Finance. She previously built AI products for fintech companies and worked in finance at JPMorgan, bridging the gap between cutting-edge technology and enterprise financial operations.

Christine Watts, Co-founder and CTO, holds a Bachelor of Science from MIT in Artificial Intelligence. Her experience includes building machine learning systems for early- and growth-stage startups, as well as consulting at BCG and NERA. This combination of technical depth and advisory experience informs Oxus’s focus on practical, enterprise-ready AI rather than experimental tooling.

Together, the founding team brings a rare blend of regulatory awareness, financial domain knowledge, and AI engineering expertise.

Why Is Oxus Positioned Well for the Future of Audit and Compliance?

As companies grow, go public, or prepare for IPOs, audit complexity increases exponentially. More systems, more transactions, more employees, and more regulatory scrutiny all translate into heavier audit workloads. At the same time, finance and audit teams are under pressure to do more with fewer resources.

Oxus enters the market at a moment when AI adoption in enterprise functions is accelerating, but trust and reliability remain critical. By focusing on traceable outputs, reviewer-ready documentation, and clear audit trails, Oxus aligns AI efficiency with compliance requirements rather than working against them.

The platform’s AI-native design also positions it to evolve alongside regulatory demands. As standards change and audit scope expands, automation becomes not just an advantage, but a necessity. Oxus is built to scale with that reality.

What Does “Modern Intelligence for Better Audits” Really Mean?

Oxus describes itself as “modern intelligence for better audits,” a phrase that reflects its core philosophy. Intelligence, in this context, is not about replacing auditors, but about augmenting them with systems that can process information faster and more consistently than humans alone.

Better audits mean audits that are faster, cheaper, more accurate, and more focused on real risk. They mean less time spent assembling paperwork and more time spent understanding how a business truly operates. Oxus aims to make that shift possible by turning audit work into a structured, automated, and repeatable process.

In doing so, Oxus is not just building a tool—it is redefining how internal audits are performed in an era where manual workflows are no longer sustainable.

Why Could Oxus Become a Defining Platform for Audit Teams?

By tackling one of the most entrenched, costly, and inefficient enterprise workflows, Oxus addresses a problem that nearly every public company faces. Its promise—10x faster audits and millions saved in outsourcing fees—speaks directly to both CFOs and audit leaders.

With a strong founding team, a clear understanding of regulatory pain points, and an AI-native approach to automation, Oxus is positioned to become a foundational platform for internal audit teams navigating the complexities of modern compliance. As more companies seek smarter, faster ways to meet regulatory requirements, Oxus stands out as a compelling example of how AI can deliver real, measurable impact in enterprise operations.