Connect with us

Technology

Startup Founded by Ex-Revolut Employees Uses AI to Automate Accounts, But Hopes to Keep Accountants in Jobs

Published

on

A startup from ex-Revolut employees uses AI to automate accounts — but hopes to keep accountants in jobs

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.

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
Continue Reading
Advertisement
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Technology

Department of Justice: Google must sell Chrome to end its monopoly

Published

on

By

Google corporate logo hangs outside the Google Germany offices

The U.S. Department of Justice argued Wednesday that Google should sell its Chrome browser as part of a countermeasure to break the corporate’s illegal monopoly on online search, according to a filing with the Justice Department. United States District Court for the District of Columbia. If the answer proposed by the Department of Justice is approved, Google won’t have the option to re-enter the search marketplace for five years.

Ultimately, it’ll be District Court Judge Amit Mehta who will determine what the ultimate punishment for Google might be. This decision could fundamentally change one of the most important firms on the planet and alter the structure of the Internet as we understand it. This phase of the method is anticipated to begin sometime in 2025.

In August, Judge Mehta ruled that Google constituted an illegal monopoly since it abused its power within the search industry. The judge also questioned Google’s control over various web gateways and the corporate’s payments to third parties to maintain its status because the default search engine.

The Department of Justice’s latest filing says Google’s ownership of Android and Chrome, that are key distribution channels for its search business, poses a “significant challenge” to remediation to ensure a competitive search market.

The Justice Department has proposed other remedies to address the search engine giant’s monopoly, including Google spinning off its Android mobile operating system. The filing indicated that Google and other partners may oppose the spin-off and suggested stringent countermeasures, including ending the use of Android to the detriment of search engine competitors. The Department of Justice has suggested that if Google doesn’t impose restrictions on Android, it must be forced to sell it.

Prosecutors also argued that the corporate must be barred from stepping into exclusionary third-party agreements with browser or phone firms, resembling Google’s agreement with Apple to be the default search engine on all Apple products.

The Justice Department also argued that Google should license its search data, together with ad click data, to competitors.

Additionally, the Department of Justice also set conditions prohibiting Google from re-entering the browser market five years after the spin-off of Chrome. Additionally, it also proposed that after the sale of Chrome, Google mustn’t acquire or own any competing ad text search engine, query-based AI product, or ad technology. Moreover, the document identifies provisions that allow publishers to opt out of Google using their data to train artificial intelligence models.

If the court accepts these measures, Google will face a serious setback as a competitor to OpenAI, Microsoft and Anthropic in AI technology.

Google’s answer

In response, Google said the Department of Justice’s latest filing constitutes a “radical interventionist program” that may harm U.S. residents and the country’s technological prowess on the planet.

“The Department of Justice’s wildly overblown proposal goes far beyond the Court’s decision. “It would destroy the entire range of Google products – even beyond search – that people love and find useful in their everyday lives,” said Google’s president of global affairs and chief legal officer Kent Walker. blog post.

Walker made additional arguments that the proposal would threaten user security and privacy, degrade the standard of the Chrome and Android browsers, and harm services resembling Mozilla Firefox, which depends upon Google’s search engine.

He added that if the proposal is adopted, it could make it tougher for people to access Google search. Moreover, it could hurt the corporate’s prospects within the AI ​​race.

“The Justice Department’s approach would lead to unprecedented government overreach that would harm American consumers, developers and small businesses and threaten America’s global economic and technological leadership at precisely the moment when it is needed most,” he said.

The company is to submit a response to the above request next month.

Wednesday’s filing confirms earlier reports that prosecutors were considering getting Google to spin off Chrome, which controls about 61% of the U.S. browser market. According to to the StatCounter web traffic service.

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
Continue Reading

Technology

Snowflake acquires data management company Datavolo

Published

on

By

The Snowflake Inc logo, which represents the American cloud computing-based data company that offers cloud-based storage and analytics services, is being displayed on their pavilion at the Mobile World Congress 2024 in Barcelona, Spain, on February 28, 2024.

Cloud giant Snowflake has agreed to take over Datavoloa company managing the data pipeline, for an undisclosed amount.

Snowflake announced the deal on Wednesday after the market bell closed, while reporting its third-quarter 2025 earnings. The purchase has not yet closed and is subject to customary closing conditions, Snowflake noted wa release.

Joseph Witt and Luke Roquet, who met while working together at Hortonworks, founded Datavolo in 2023. Witt was previously a vp at Cloudera, and Roquet was Cloudera’s chief marketing officer and, before that, director of business development at AWS.

Datavolo uses Apache NiFi, an open source data processing project developed by the NSA, to power a platform to automate data flow between disparate enterprise data sources. Data “processors” extract, cleanse, transform and enrich data, including for generative use of artificial intelligence.

With Datavolo having raised $21 million in enterprise capital from investors including Citi Ventures and General Catalyst prior to the acquisition, Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy envisions creating more comprehensive data pipelines for Snowflake customers. For example, he says Datavolo can enable users to interchange single-use data connectors with flexible pipelines that allow them to maneuver data from cloud and on-premises sources to Snowflake’s data cloud.

“By bringing Datavolo to Snowflake, we are increasing the amount of data captured by Snowflake over the lifecycle, providing our customers with both simplicity and cost savings, without sacrificing data extensibility,” Ramaswamy said in a press release. “We are thrilled to have the Datavolo team join Snowflake as we accelerate the best platform for enterprise data – unstructured and structured, batch and streaming – and committed to the success of the open source community.”

Witt says Snowflake will support and help manage the Apache NiFi project after the acquisition closes. “Data engineering at scale can be extremely expensive and complex, and our goal has always been to simplify our customers’ experiences so they can realize value faster,” he added within the press release. “By joining forces with Snowflake, we can deliver the massive scale and radical simplicity of the Snowflake platform to our customers, ultimately unlocking data engineering for more users.”

Thanks partly to artificial intelligence, demand for data management technologies has increased. Fortune’s business insights estimates that the worldwide enterprise data management market could possibly be price $224.87 billion by 2032.

However, data management has been a challenge for enterprises long before the substitute intelligence boom. According to in a 2022 survey by Great Hopetions, a data quality platform, 91% of organizations said data quality issues impact their performance.

Against this backdrop, it isn’t surprising that firms like Datavolo are gaining prominence.

Today was a giant day for Snowflake who reported better-than-expected earnings sent the company’s shares up 19%. In addition to the acquisition of Snowflake, the company announced a multi-year partnership with Anthropic to integrate the startup’s AI models into Snowflake’s Cortex AI, Snowflake Intelligence and Cortex Analyst products.

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
Continue Reading

Technology

Federal prosecutors have charged another Forbes 30 Under 30 alum with fraud

Published

on

By

Studio image of a padlock on top of a credit cardchampagne coloured background, could symbolize ideas around encryption, credit card safety, security and passwords

FBI yesterday he unveiled the indictment which accused Joanna Smith-Griffin, founding father of the bogus intelligence startup AllHere Education, of engaging in “securities fraud, wire fraud and aggravated identity theft in connection with defrauding investors” of nearly $10 million. The FBI alleges that from a minimum of November 2020 through June 2024, she misrepresented her company’s revenue, customer base and money to investors.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the corporate is in Chapter 7 bankruptcy. If convicted, Smith-Griffin faces prison sentences that include a maximum sentence of 20 years for securities fraud, a maximum sentence of 20 years for wire fraud, and a compulsory sentence two years for a professional identity thief. Smith-Griffin couldn’t be reached for comment.

The Forbes 30 Under 30 list has change into a meme over the past few years as several winners have been accused of fraud. The The Forbes-for-scam pipeline includes FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison, co-CEO of (*30*) Research; Fintech founder Frank, Charlie Javice, and “Pharma bro” Martin Shkreli.

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
Continue Reading
Advertisement

OUR NEWSLETTER

Subscribe Us To Receive Our Latest News Directly In Your Inbox!

We don’t spam! Read our privacy policy for more info.

Trending