Haast raises $17.2 million to automate compliance checks

Haast has raised $17.2 million in Series A funding, taking total funding for the Sydney-founded company to $24.4 million.

Peak XV Partners led the round, with participation from DST Global Partners, Airtree, Aura Ventures and Black Sheep Capital. The company plans to use the capital to expand product development, build out its automated workflow tools and grow its international enterprise customer base.

Haast sells software that automates compliance checks within day-to-day business workflows. It is targeting a growing challenge for large organisations as they produce more marketing, product and sales content with generative AI tools.

According to Haast, corporate content volumes have risen eight- to tenfold as AI has spread across business functions. Its research also found that legal and compliance teams still spend 70% of their time on manual, repetitive or automatable review work.

Compliance Pressure

Haast argues that policy rules, risk settings and approval steps should be built into operational systems rather than handled separately. Its AI agents apply those rules within enterprise workflows, aiming to reduce manual review while keeping records of decisions and approvals.

The approach reflects a broader shift in corporate software spending as companies try to manage the risks created by faster content generation. Large language models have been adopted across marketing and go-to-market teams, but internal governance processes often remain labour-intensive.

Founded in Sydney in 2023, Haast is now headquartered in New York, with offices in San Francisco and Sydney. It says it works with Fortune 500 customers, though it did not name them.

The company also reported 4.5 times revenue growth over the past 12 months and no customer churn during that period. Those figures suggest investors are backing it on the strength of customer retention and rising demand for tools that sit between frontline teams and internal control functions.

Kunal Vankadara, Haast's co-founder and chief executive, said the company is focused on automating compliance within core workflows.

"Enterprises shouldn't have to choose between moving fast and staying compliant, and that trade-off is exactly what manual review processes currently force on teams," Vankadara said. "We built Haast to transform compliance from a generic assistive checkpoint into an intelligent, automated engine embedded directly within global enterprises. By embedding policy and risk standards directly into the fabric of every workflow, we empower teams to move at AI speed with confidence, unlocking real efficiency and output gains without ever compromising governance."

Investor View

Investors in the round said rising content output and tighter regulatory demands are creating an opening for software focused on review and approval processes.

"We are seeing a major shift across large enterprises: a content explosion driven by LLMs alongside an increasingly complex regulatory landscape," said Rohit Agarwal, managing director at Peak XV Partners. "

In a world where every screen and ad is personalised, manual review is no longer just slow, it's impossible. Haast is solving a multi-billion dollar bottleneck by turning compliance into an automated enabler. They are helping the world's leading brands unlock the full potential of GenAI without the looming threat of regulatory friction or brand damage. We are excited to partner with Haast as they reinvent AI-native compliance."

Airtree, which also joined the round, pointed to retention and customer expansion as signs of demand in a category where procurement cycles can be long and implementation complex.

"When we first met Haast, the customer feedback was astounding - customers were obsessed with the product and couldn't live without it," said Jackie Vullinghs, partner at Airtree. "In the last year, that love materialised in the numbers: zero churn and strong expansion with existing customers. It's testament to the execution of Kunal and the team in a complex, regulated market, allowing Haast to become the infrastructure layer for compliance in the enterprise."

Haast's funding round comes as businesses look for ways to put more controls around AI-generated material without slowing publishing and approval cycles. The company's pitch to customers and investors is that compliance is shifting from a separate review step to a built-in part of daily operations, supported by software that creates an audit trail of decisions.