Startup Founded by 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.