Oslo-based Kosli has raised €9.2 million in Series A funding from Deutsche Bank’s Corporate Venture Capital group, Heavybit, Defined Capital, and Transpose Platform to expand its automated governance solutions for software delivery in financial services. The funding will support Kosli’s efforts to help banks and other regulated institutions streamline compliance processes, automate change management, and improve audit transparency. With financial firms facing growing regulatory demands, Kosli’s technology enables real-time tracking of software changes and integration with existing development tools, addressing bottlenecks in governance, risk, and compliance workflows.
Kosli develops automated governance solutions for software delivery, focusing on compliance and risk management in regulated industries such as financial services. Its technology enables organizations to track and document software changes in real time, integrating with existing development tools to support regulatory requirements. By addressing challenges in governance, risk, and compliance workflows, Kosli’s platform is used by banks and financial institutions to streamline audit processes and ensure transparency in software deployment.
Kosli Enterprise also launched today with new features for financial services businesses, including support for large user bases, change management automation, and audit evidence generation.
“Kosli addresses the specific needs of software development teams that operate in highly regulated industries,” said Martin Reeves, who leads Engineering Platforms and Practice at Deutsche Bank’s Technology, Data and Innovation division. “We are delighted to partner and collaborate with Kosli to drive our vision of a highly efficient, transparent, and secure software development lifecycle that empowers our engineers to focus on developing solutions for the bank’s clients.”
Governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) workflows have lagged behind the significant cloud and DevOps transformations in software development, creating a slow and costly bottleneck that delays the release of changes to production – while also increasing risk. In a 2024 McKinsey survey, 41 percent of global financial institutions said metrics and reporting capabilities were a key weakness in their overall infrastructure.
Since its launch in 2019, Kosli has been helping financial institutions navigate this tension, both as an enterprise-ready technology solution for governance process automation across the entire software stack, but also as expert advisors to guide an organization’s software delivery governance strategy.
“Kosli has been a great partner, not just in terms of their product and the control that it offers us, but also the end-to-end thinking around how we build a strong, well-governed, well-controlled process,” shared Sean Longton, CIO, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank. “With the emergence of AI and the rapid growth we’re experiencing, this criticality is not going to reduce. So, we need the right tools and the right mindset, and with Kosli we’re getting the product capability and the strategic guidance that we need.”
“Kosli enables us to deliver secure, compliant software more efficiently, so we can focus on innovating for our customers,” said Patrick Linnane, CISSP Senior Director of Information Security Operations at Emburse. “By automating compliance and providing real-time visibility into our software deployments, we reduce operational complexity and ensure faster, more reliable product updates. Their expertise in software delivery compliance helps us maintain the highest security and regulatory standards, ultimately giving our customers greater confidence in the solutions we provide.”
Kosli addresses compliance challenges in software delivery for financial institutions and other highly regulated industries by automating governance and risk management processes. It ensures that every software change is recorded, linking runtime environment modifications to development actions for complete traceability. By automating change controls and audits, Kosli eliminates manual paperwork and delays, allowing delivery teams to maintain compliance efficiently.
Designed for large, distributed teams, the platform seamlessly integrates with existing runtimes and CI/CD tools without requiring major workflow changes. Prioritizing security, Kosli does not extract data from customers’ systems but allows them to selectively push relevant information for safekeeping. Its audit records are immutable, ensuring a provable and tamper-proof compliance history. Additionally, Kosli provides professional services to help enterprises align high-level governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) controls with the granular realities of modern software development.
“Right now, teams in regulated industries are basing control and audit decisions on information that is written into text boxes. It destroys software delivery performance with manual work, and piles up errors and risks that are found retrospectively in audits or system failures,” said Kosli CEO and co-founder Mike Long. “We want to transform this broken process with controls engineering so that teams can deliver compliant, secure changes quickly at scale.”
Kosli will use the funding to accelerate its adoption in servicing large banking clients, grow the team in all departments, and invest heavily in building more differentiated technology to automatically record and control the software delivery process.
“At Heavybit, we recognize the importance of being able to guarantee, in an era of AI-generated software, what software is running and when. We’re excited to support Kosli’s mission of delivering software more securely and with more accountability,” added Heavybit Managing Director, Tom Drummond.
“Defined partnered with Kosli as the rapid rise of AI-generated software has resulted in significant new demands around code review, security validation, quality assurance and regulatory compliance. This increased verification overhead arguably offsets a considerable amount of the productivity gains. We’re excited by Kosli’s solution as it addresses these bottlenecks to unlock compliant DevOps automation at scale,” said Defined Founding Partner, Mark Trevitt.
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Read the orginal article: https://arcticstartup.com/kosli-raises-e9-2mseries-a/
