Closing the Audit Handoff Gap
Sam Li and Austin Ogilvie, co-CEOs of Laika, on the compliance-as-a-service business model
The strategic move was to turn audit prep software into a shared workflow for both the company and the auditor. Laika learned that passing internal monitors was not enough, because a SOC 2 report is still issued by an external CPA who must review evidence in a format they trust. That gap created duplicate work, back and forth requests, and a risk that the final audit still felt manual even after the customer had done the setup work in software.
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In practice, the handoff problem meant a startup could connect AWS, GitHub, Jira, and HR tools, see green checks inside the product, then still have to repackage the same evidence for an outside auditor. Laika responded by building auditor side tooling connected to the same data, so evidence could be shared and verified inside one workflow.
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This is why compliance automation has never been pure self serve software. The external audit remains a required human step, and audit quality varies by firm and by individual CPA. That makes trust, evidence formatting, and reviewer workflow just as important as automated data collection.
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The same dynamic shaped the category. Vanta, Laika, and related vendors all started by replacing the old $50K to $100K, year long audit prep slog with software, then expanded into auditor partnerships, recurring subscriptions, and more frameworks. Recent category leaders have scaled far beyond the original SOC 2 wedge, with Vanta estimated at $220M ARR in July 2025 and Drata at $98M revenue in January 2025.
The market is heading toward tighter vertical integration between prep, monitoring, audit execution, and adjacent security workflows. The winner is likely to be the platform that not only tells a company what controls are broken, but also gives auditors a faster way to issue reports and gives buyers a cleaner way to review trust evidence across many frameworks.