Often, successful startups can provide rise to “startup mafias” – groups of former founders who create recent startups. But not less than as often, recent startups will be founded by employees. In the case of Live FlowThat’s exactly what happened — and up to now, $13.5 million has been raised.

A number of years ago, Anita Koimur was heading up the loyalty products department at fintech leader Revolut, while Lasse Kalkar was the country manager for the Nordic region.

After meeting, they kept in touch and later, as co-founders, got here up with the thought for LiveFlow, running it through Y Combinator after which raising a Seed round in 2021.

LiveFlow enables businesses to sync real-time data from their accounting services, banks, and payment platforms to their custom reports, automating workflows, consolidating business accounts, and enabling greater collaboration across the business. You might think that sounds easy, but even today, it’s a world where accountants have to transfer data between systems, often manually.

But as enterprise platforms regularly entrench themselves into accountants’ workflows, many are selecting to leave the industry, especially now that artificial intelligence is starting to take jobs away from humans. And the evidence is growing.

More than 300,000 U.S. accountants and auditors left their jobs between 2019 and 2021, and the variety of accountants in the U.S. fell 15.9% since 2019, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Meanwhile, younger accountants aged 25 to 34 and mid-career professionals aged 45 to 54 are leaving the career.

LiveFlow hopes not to speed up this flow, but to stop it. CEO Kalkar told TechCrunch that, “Our plan is to use AI to make accounting firms more efficient, but we think the accountant will still be there.”

Why is that this happening?

“Basically,” Kalkar said, “small businesses hire an accountant to feel secure. They want to know that someone has their back. We can’t completely replace that with technology.”

Still, Kalkar wouldn’t reveal what sort of AI the corporate plans to use: “It’s still in the pipeline and will be implemented in the next year or more… Unfortunately, we don’t disclose what AI we’re currently using.”

Whatever they’re doing, it seems to be working.

The startup has just raised $13.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Valar Ventures. VC co-founded by Peter Thiel, it was the primary enterprise capital fund to invest in Xero and later TransferWise.

Koimur and Kalkar, joined by former Web Summit engineering chief Evans O’Brien, at the moment are planning to expand into the US market, with headquarters in New York.

The company’s current clients include accounting firms corresponding to BDO and KLR, in addition to Wendy’s and Crumbl Cookies brands.

The company’s newest product, LiveFlow Next, is designed to unlock accounting to do more consulting work.

In a press release, Valar founder James Fitzgerald said, “LiveFlow helps save countless hours per month while eliminating human error.”

While LiveFlow has competitors, none of them are currently backed by equity investors. Understandfrom Australia is doing something similar, even though it apparently hasn’t secured VC funding, while Coverage Reporting According to Cruchbase, an organization in the US is in an analogous situation.

WordPress hosting service WP Engine shipped on Monday letter requesting to stop and desist to Automattic after its CEO Matt Mullenweg called WP Engine “cancer for WordPress” last week.

The notice asked Automattic and Mullenweg to retract their comments and stop and desist from making statements against the corporate.

WP Engine, which (like Automattic itself) commercializes the open-source WordPress project, also accused Mullenweg of constructing threats against WP Engine ahead of last week’s WordCamp summit.

“Automattic CEO Matthew Mullenweg has threatened that if WP Engine does not agree to pay Automattic — his for-profit subsidiary — a very large sum of money before his September 20 keynote speech at WordCamp US, he will engage in what he calls ‘nuclear, scorched earth warfare’ against WP Engine within the WordPress community and beyond,” the letter reads.

“When his outrageous financial demands were not met, Mr. Mullenweg followed through on his threats, repeating false statements that defamed WP Engine to its employees, customers, and the world at large,” the letter added.

The letter went on to assert that Automattic last week began asking WP Engine to pay “a significant percentage of its gross revenues — in fact, tens of millions of dollars — on an ongoing basis” for a license to make use of trademarks equivalent to “WordPress.”

WP Engine defended its use of the “WordPress” trademark under fair use laws and said it was consistent with the platform’s guidelines. The letter also includes screenshots of Mullenweg’s text messages to WP Engine’s CEO and board members, which apparently state that Mullenweg will argue for a ban on WP Engine in his WordCamp keynote if the corporate doesn’t comply with Automattic’s demands.

Automattic didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.

Mullenweg, a co-founder of WordPress, criticized WP Engine last week for generating profits without giving much back to the open-source project, in addition to disabling key features that make WordPress such a powerful platform.

Last week in blog postMullenweg said that WP Engine devotes 47 hours a week to this purpose. “Five for the Future” investment commitment to contribute resources to WordPress’ sustainable growth. By comparison, he said Automattic contributes about 3,900 a week. He acknowledged that while those numbers are only an “approximation,” there may be a big gap in contributions, though each corporations are similar in size and generate about half a billion dollars in revenue.

IN separate blog postHe also added that WP Engine offers customers a “cheap knockoff” of WordPress.

Notably, Automattic invested in WP Engine in 2011, when the corporate raised $1.2 million in funding. Since then, WP Engine has raised over $300 million in equity, nearly all of which got here from a $250 million investment from private equity firm Silver Lake in 2018.

OpenAI’s official press account on Platform X was more than likely hijacked by the identical cryptocurrency scammers who did the identical to the corporate’s executives in previous months.

Late Monday afternoon, OpenAI Press OfficeAn account recently created by OpenAI to advertise product and policy announcements posted about OpenAI’s supposedly recent blockchain token, “$OPENAI.”

“We are very pleased to announce $OPEANAI (sic): the gap between AI and blockchain technology,” the post read. “All OpenAI users are eligible to claim a share of the initial supply of $OPENAI. Owning $OPENAI will grant access to all of our future beta programs.”

Of course, $OPENAI doesn’t exist — and the post on X included a link to a phishing page designed to mimic the legitimate OpenAI site (minus the obviously invalid “token-openai.com” URL). A distinguished “CLAIM $OPENAI” button on the fake page encouraged unsuspecting users to attach their crypto wallets, presumably to be able to steal those users’ login credentials.

At the time of publication, each the post and the page were still available — as were a repost and a reply promising “further information” concerning the token “(will) be available later in the week.” Comments on X’s malicious post have been disabled, making the hack less obvious than it’d otherwise have been.

We have reached out to OpenAI and X for comment. We will update this text if we hear back.

This shouldn’t be the primary time that OpenAI-related accounts have fallen victim to a phishing attack.

In June 2023, OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s account posted an analogous message promoting the fictional crypto token $OPENAI. And just three months ago, the accounts of OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki and OpenAI Researcher Jason Wei were hacked and used to publish fraudulent posts equivalent to today’s post on the OpenAI Newsroom account.

Coin speaker, Reporting in reference to the hack into Murati’s account last June, he said the scammers used a “cryptocurrency siphoning” tool that redirected all of the NFTs and tokens the victims had of their wallets to the scammers’ wallet after they logged right into a fake OpenAI website.

Other popular X accounts belonging to tech firms and celebrities have been hacked lately to advertise crypto scams. In perhaps essentially the most infamous example, in 2020, hackers targeted accounts belonging to Apple, Elon Musk, and Joe Biden to post a Bitcoin wallet address with the claim that any payments made to the address can be doubled and sent back.

Americans lost $5.6 billion to cryptocurrency scams in 2023, up 45% from 2022 According to to the FBI. 2024 is on track to be just as bad — or worse. More than 50,000 scams were reported in the primary half of this 12 months, costing consumers nearly $2.5 billion, for FTC (Frankfurt Trade Commission)