Company Roundup, auditRAMP(AI)
Founded by Ray Karnes in Durango, auditRAMP AI was crated to address the friction in the auditing process. Not by measuring the work, but by comparing the sticky points. As a former GitPrime Engineer, an exited Durango startup, Karnes was able to identify a gap in the auditing process using his unique skills developed throughout his career. In this Q&A he uncovers how he landed on this trajectory and proves that the startup ecosystem in Durango is always creating.
Q: What's your name, title, company
A: Ray Karnes, Founder & CEO, auditRAMP AI
Q: What does your company do?
A: auditRAMP AI builds software for the people who audit other companies — the accountants and internal auditors who check whether a business's controls and numbers hold up.
Two things, and they're connected. The first is a research study called AuditEx that measures where audit work actually snags: where the time goes, where handoffs stall, what keeps getting passed back and forth. Every firm tracks its output — findings, hours, deadlines met — and nobody measures the friction, which is the thing that shows up months before a deadline gets missed. It deliberately doesn't grade anyone's work. That's what makes people answer it honestly.
The second is the product the research points at: a workbench called Assurance Desk for the mapping and reconciliation work auditors still do by hand, heading toward automating the testing itself. The study tells us where the pain actually is, so the tooling gets built against evidence instead of a guess.
Q: Tell us about your entrepreneurial journey.
A: I came to audit sideways. I worked in engineering metrics at GitPrime, which pioneered measuring how software teams actually work from telemetry rather than opinion, and was later acquired by Pluralsight. After that, at Schneider Electric, I was on the customer side of a developer-experience engagement — running the surveys was a core part of my job, not a side project.
So I've been on both ends of the same idea: building the instrument, and living with one somebody else built. When I started looking at audit, what struck me was that the entire profession runs on judgment about how work gets done, and has nothing equivalent. Firms compare findings and hours. Nobody compares friction. auditRAMP AI came out of that gap.
Q: What was the most powerful lesson you learned on this journey?
A: The fastest way to kill a measurement program is to grade people with it.
The moment a number can be used to judge you, the answers stop being true, and you're left with a dataset that looks rigorous and describes nothing. I'd watched that happen in engineering. So AuditEx is built so it structurally cannot do it — there is no quality measure anywhere in the instrument, and nobody's employer ever sees who said what. That isn't a privacy policy bolted on afterward. It's the reason the data is worth having at all.
Q: Why did you apply for the SCAPE Program?
A: I'm a solo founder building something technical for an industry that doesn't buy on a demo. What I need isn't encouragement — it's people who will tell me which parts don't hold up, and a network I can't reach from my own desk.
A cohort also imposes a rhythm. Building alone, you can spend a month on the thing you're best at instead of the thing that matters most, and nobody notices. I'd rather be somewhere that notices.
Q: What companies inspire you the most (local, national, worldwide)?
A: GitPrime and DX, for the same reason: both took something everyone insisted was unmeasurable — how knowledge work actually runs — and measured it carefully enough that serious people changed how they operated. Not by grading individuals, which is where these efforts usually go wrong, but by making the system visible.
Q: What do you love most about Southwest Colorado?
A: Being one step from the outdoors, in a community of people who love that too.
