From nights and weekends to national attention, Roz is proving that Kansas City hustle can power big-time innovation.
Co-founders Sarah Hampton and Donnie Hampton built Roz from a simple pain point: compliance is broken. Now, the Olathe-based AI startup is automating the most complex and tedious parts of the compliance process to help enterprise companies identify documentation gaps, pull evidence automatically, and continuously stay in check with audits, contracts and regulations.
And the industry is paying attention. Roz has secured $2.15 million in early funding, including a $1.875M pre-seed round led by Outlander VC and KCRise Fund, plus a $275K boost from NYC’s Entrepreneurs Roundtable accelerator. They’ve landed a pilot with a Fortune 100 company, refined their ideal customer profile, and launched a new strategy and branding to match their explosive growth.
Roz is a proud alum of Pure Pitch Rally, LaunchKC and Digital Sandbox KC, early-stage programs the founders deem to have been mission critical.
“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,” co-founder Donnie Hampton continued, “we wouldn’t even have started with some of our development resources.”
The Roz journey has been anything but typical. The duo almost built a data security platform — until Donnie convinced Sarah to revisit her most-hated job function: compliance. What started as a reluctant experiment turned into a bold mission to cut manual compliance analysis by 90 percent and transform months of work into days.
“It’s been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made,” Sarah Hampton (no relation), co-founder of Roz, said. “What we’re building can really unlock real value and supercharge teams,” Donnie Hampton added.
Roz isn’t just growing fast, it’s scaling smart. With support from the Pipeline network, a national accelerator and the trusted KC ecosystem, they’ve evolved from a bootstrapped idea into a fast-scaling AI platform defining the future of compliance.
