Kosli Secures $10M from Deutsche Bank & Heavybit to Revolutionize Fintech Software Governance
Kosli, a pioneering provider of automated governance solutions designed specifically for software delivery within regulated industries, has successfully raised $10 million in Series A funding. This funding round was co-led by Deutsche Bank‘s Corporate Venture Capital (CVC) group and Heavybit, with additional participation from Defined Capital, Transpose Platform, and a number of prominent angel investors.
The funding announcement coincides with the launch of Kosli Enterprise, an enhanced version of their platform aimed at supporting the unique and stringent needs of financial services organizations. Kosli Enterprise introduces advanced features such as support for large, distributed user bases, robust change management automation, and seamless audit evidence generation—capabilities designed to empower highly regulated businesses to improve efficiency without compromising compliance or security.
Deutsche Bank’s Strategic Partnership with Kosli
One of the most notable backers of this funding round is Deutsche Bank, a global leader in financial services. Martin Reeves, who heads Engineering Platforms and Deutsche Bank Practice within Deutsche Bank’s Technology, Data, and Innovation division, highlighted the bank’s strategic rationale for investing in Kosli:
“Kosli addresses the specific needs of software development teams that operate in highly regulated industries,” Reeves stated. “We are delighted to partner and collaborate with Kosli to drive our vision of a highly efficient, transparent, and secure software development lifecycle. This empowers our engineers to focus on developing solutions for the bank’s clients without being hindered by governance roadblocks.”
The Challenge of Governance in Regulated Industries
In recent years, the software development landscape has undergone rapid transformation, with cloud computing, DevOps methodologies, and continuous delivery practices becoming the norm. However, governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) workflows in industries like banking, insurance, and healthcare have not evolved at the same pace. These workflows are often manual, labor-intensive, and disconnected from modern software delivery pipelines, resulting in significant bottlenecks that slow down innovation and increase operational risk.
A 2024 McKinsey survey of global financial institutions underscores the extent of this challenge. According to the survey, 41 percent of respondents cited metrics and reporting capabilities as a critical weakness in their technology infrastructure, particularly in terms of compliance and audit Deutsche Bank readiness. For organizations operating under strict regulatory frameworks, the inability to swiftly and accurately generate audit trails and compliance reports can have far-reaching consequences, ranging from fines and penalties to reputational damage.
Since its founding in 2019, Kosli has sought to bridge this gap. By providing an enterprise-ready platform that automates governance processes across the software development lifecycle, Kosli has enabled financial institutions to modernize their delivery practices while maintaining the highest standards of compliance.
Real-World Impact: Testimonials from Industry Leaders
Kosli’s impact is perhaps best illustrated by the testimonials from its customers in the financial sector. Sean Longton, Chief Information Officer at Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, emphasized the value Kosli brings, not just through its technology, but also its strategic advisory role:
“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,” Longton shared. “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.”
Similarly, Patrick Linnane, CISSP and Senior Director of Information Security Operations at Emburse, highlighted Kosli’s ability to streamline compliance while enhancing security:
“Kosli enables us to deliver secure, compliant software more efficiently, so we can focus on innovating for our customers,” Linnane explained. “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’s Core Features: Addressing Compliance Challenges Head-On
Kosli’s platform is engineered to alleviate the compliance challenges inherent in regulated software environments. Some of its standout features include:
- Comprehensive Change Tracking: Every software change event—no matter how minor—is meticulously recorded. This closes the governance loop by automatically connecting changes in runtime environments with corresponding development actions.
- Automated Controls and Audit Trails: Kosli eliminates the need for manual paperwork and slow approval cycles by enabling delivery teams to automate change controls, governance workflows, and audit documentation.
- Seamless Integration with Existing Tools: Recognizing that large financial institutions often have distributed teams utilizing a variety of tools, Kosli is designed to Deutsche Bank integrate flexibly with existing CI/CD pipelines, runtime environments, and version control systems.
- Customer Data Protection: Kosli places data privacy and security at the forefront. Rather than extracting sensitive information from customer environments, clients retain full control over which data is shared with Kosli’s platform.
- Immutable Audit Records: The platform ensures data integrity by allowing only append-only actions, preventing any unauthorized alterations to historical records. This guarantees the trustworthiness of audit logs.
- Controls Engineering Services: Beyond technology, Kosli offers professional services to help enterprise clients map their high-level GRC controls to the more granular software development processes, ensuring full alignment with regulatory requirements.
A Vision to Transform Software Delivery Governance
Kosli’s CEO and co-founder, Mike Long, articulated the company’s mission to modernize and streamline governance processes:
“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,” Long remarked. “We want to transform this broken process with controls engineering so that teams can deliver compliant, secure changes quickly at scale.”
With the $10 million Series A investment, Kosli plans to accelerate its growth by focusing on several key areas. These include expanding its footprint within the financial services sector, scaling its workforce across all departments, and investing heavily in the continuous development of differentiated technologies that automate software delivery governance from end to end.
