Roz audits its path to $2.15M in early funding; how KC helped this AI startup scale its potential

A series of funding wins is boosting a Kansas City startup’s efforts to automate the most complex — and tedious — parts of compliance work, drawing from the co-founder’s own pain points and resources from a server-full of local entrepreneur support initiatives. 

With $2.15 million in funding under its belt so far, Olathe-based Roz — which finds documentation gaps, pulls evidence automatically, and checks continuously if companies are compliant with audits, contracts, regulations — is riding a wave of headlines with high-profile competitions and accelerators. It landed a pilot with a Fortune 100 company, and refreshed both its strategy and branding.

“We’re in a completely different space than where we started,” said Sarah Hampton, who co-founded Roz with Donnie Hampton (no relation in May 2024), “because Donnie and I bootstrapped for a very long time. We both had opportunities to get comfortable jobs, but we decided just to spend the days, nights, and weekends building this product without a lot of money. Donnie and I were doing everything for a while, and now that we have the funding — which has been amazing — we have been able to grow our company pretty significantly.”

Funding for the alum of Kansas City-based programs like Digital Sandbox KC, Pure Pitch Rally, and LaunchKC includes a $1.875 million pre-seed round this summer, led by Outlander VC with investments by KCRise Fund and angel investors. Roz also benefited from work with the Entrepreneurs Roundtable in New York, a super angel/accelerator that netted an additional $275,000 in early 2025.

Digital Sandbox KC’s awardees for Q3 2024: Blake Lappan, NoDwell; Donnie Hampton, Roz; Karli Kujawa, Whatabout; Justin Axtell, Whatabout; and Claire Harrison, Whatabout; photo courtesy of UMKC Innovation Center

Taking advantage of resources curated for Kansas City entrepreneurs helped Roz reach these milestones, emphasized Donnie Hampton, who also is a fellow in the Pipeline network.

Donnie Hampton, Roz, pitches during LaunchKC’s 2024 event; photo by Nikki Overfelt Chifalu, Startland News

“All of them played a really important part in where we are today,” Donnie said. “Getting into Launch KC helped us gain more notoriety, opening the door to funding and community. Pure Pitch Rally introduced us to a lot of companies and folks who believed in us and helped make some initial intros.”

“And if it wasn’t for Digital Sandbox,” he continued, “we wouldn’t even have started with some of our development resources. We probably wouldn’t have pushed the pedal to the metal there because of that opportunity. They helped us force an early story of like, ‘Where are you going?’”

The Roz co-founders’ time with Entrepreneurs Roundtable in New York led to the startup’s first big pivot, they acknowledged. Initially their target market was small and medium sized businesses. But during the accelerator, they realized focusing on enterprise businesses made more sense.

“We started with SMBs and unfortunately, realized that — no joke — compliance is a bit of a checkbox for them because they’re just trying to survive,” Donnie explained. “But when you get into large, complex organizations, they have to do it.”

“If we hadn’t gone through that, I do think that we wouldn’t be with the right ICP (ideal customer profile),” Sarah added. “It really just defined who we are as a company, helped create structure, and then really got us into the right way of moving to truly accelerate us.”

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Tapping into years of trust

Donnie and Sarah met 15 years ago through a new hire program at the Oklahoma oil and gas company where they both worked, the co-founders shared.

“So the first, real, big-person job that we both had was the same, learning about how technology will impact the oil and gas industry,” Donnie said.

“Ironically enough, she gives me a lot of credit for her last name,” he added, “which is funny because I did introduce her, technically, to her husband, who is Daniel Hampton (also no relation to Donnie).”

Even after leaving that job, the two remained close friends, they explained. Then serendipitously, both were leaving jobs at the same time and thinking about their next steps. Shortly after, Donnie traveled to see Sarah, her husband, and some mutual friends.

“One of my tertiary goals was to bug Sarah to be like, ‘Hey, you want to kick the tires on some stuff?’” Donnie recalled.

Sarah Hampton, co-founder of Roz, pitches to Pure Pitch Rally investors in October 2024; photo by Taylor Wilmore, Startland News

A reluctant revelation

Initially the duo considered automation in data security, but when they realized it wasn’t the right fit, Donnie turned to manual compliance tasks — an area Sarah had happily left behind at previous jobs, she said.

Despite her initial resistance, Donnie encouraged her to try to automate the parts of her old job that — as an engineer — she liked performing least, Sarah said.

“I didn’t think I would ever get into doing compliance because I hate it so much,” she continued. “And ultimately, it’s been probably one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, just to try to automate some of the things that I personally was struggling with doing.”

“It’s a lot of documentation,” she added. “It’s a lot of understanding controls, making sure that they’ve been implemented, making sure that the auditors can audit what they need to audit, writing policies, writing procedures.”

Roz aims to reduce manual analysis by 90 percent, Sarah noted, ultimately taking a multiple-month long process and reducing it down to days.

“What we’re building can really unlock real value and supercharge teams,” Donnie added. “Without something like Roz, the alternative is just either impossible or just so manual. Even if you like it — there are certain people that do, which is wild — but even they’re like, ‘Yeah, there has to be a better way.’”