An Australian artificial intelligence startup, Haast, which helps companies manage legal and compliance checks, has raised $17.2 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Peak XV Partners, the well-known venture capital firm earlier called Sequoia Capital India & SEA. With this latest funding, the company’s total capital has now reached $24.4 million.
Its valuation is also edging closer to the $100 million mark, helped by a strong performance over the past year that included a 4.5x jump in revenue, according to The Australia Today.
The man behind this growth is Kunal Vankadara, an Indian-Australian entrepreneur and former policy adviser. He co-founded Haast to solve a problem that has dramatically increased in recent years: the flood of AI-generated content inside companies.
As businesses produce more and more content using generative AI tools, legal and compliance teams are struggling to keep up with manual reviews. The startup was built to ease that pressure by automating much of this work and cutting down the delays caused by traditional approval processes.
Who is Kunal Vankadara?
Before starting up, Kunal worked closely with the Australian Government as a Policy Adviser. He later moved into consulting at Boston Consulting Group (BCG), where he worked on strategy and business problems.
Today, that experience sits at the core of his company, Haast. Kunal started Haast with Liam King, who has a strong background in mathematics, statistics, and machine learning from the Australian National University, along with experience in IT transformation work at Deloitte.
Speaking to Australia Today, Vankadara said the company was created to remove the trade-off between speed and compliance. “Enterprises shouldn’t have to choose between moving fast and staying compliant,” he said. “We’re embedding policy and risk standards directly into workflows so teams can operate at AI speed with confidence.”
The company says it has recorded 4.5 times revenue growth over the past year and has had zero customer churn. Its clients reportedly include several unnamed Fortune 500 companies.
Haast: Built to change how legal teams work
The company, called Haast, was founded in 2023 in Sydney by Vankadara along with Liam King. It is now headquartered in New York. Haast has built an AI-powered platform that says it can do much of the work usually handled by in-house legal and compliance teams. The software can quickly scan marketing and business content, spot risks, and flag issues in just minutes.
The latest funding round, called Series A, was led by Peak XV Partners. It also saw participation from DST Global Partners, Airtree Ventures, Aura Ventures, and Black Sheep Capital. With this round, Haast’s total funding has now reached $24.4 million.
Haast’s system is designed to plug compliance checks directly into everyday workflows. This means companies can automate approval processes that usually need manual legal review. The target is to save time, reduce delays, and still keep proper records and governance in place.