Kosli raises $10m Series A from Deutsche Bank CVC & Heavybit

By Gloria Methri

Kosli, a provider of automated governance solutions for software delivery, has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Deutsche Bank’s Corporate Venture Capital (CVC) group and Heavybit. Defined Capital and Transpose Platform joined along with several angel investors.

Kosli Enterprise was also launched 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% 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 and as an expert advisor to guide an organisation’s software delivery governance strategy.

“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 record and control the software delivery process automatically.

“At Heavybit, we recognise the importance of being able to guarantee, in an era of AI-generated software, what software is running and when. We are excited to support Kosli’s mission of delivering software more securely and with more accountability,” added Heavybit Managing Director Tom Drummond.