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

As enterprise platforms gradually eat into the workflows of accountants, many are choosing to leave the industry, especially as AI automates away a lot of the core, manual work required.

More than 300,000 U.S. accountants and auditors left their jobs between 2019 and 2021, and the number of accountants in the U.S. has declined 15.9% since 2019, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Meanwhile, both younger accountants and mid-career professionals are leaving the profession.

AI accounting platform LiveFlow hopes not to hasten that flow, but to stem it. As the company's CEO and co-founder Lasse Kalkar puts it: “Our plan is to utilize AI to make accounting firms more efficient, but we think the accountant will still be there.”

To continue building its tech stack, the startup has now raised a $13.5 million Series A round led by Valar Ventures, a VC firm co-founded by Peter Thiel.

LiveFlow allows companies to sync real-time data from their accounting services, banks and payment platforms to the startup's platform, which generates custom reports, automates workflows, consolidates company accounts, and enables more company-wide collaboration. You might think that sounds easy, but even in this day and age, we're still in a world where accountants have to transfer data between systems, often manually.

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

However, Kalkar was coy about the AI models the company plans to use. “It's still in the roadmap, and it will still be rolled out over the next year or so… We are not disclosing which AI we are using right now,” Kalkar said.

Successful startups often give rise to "startup mafias" — groups of former founders who go on to found other startups. But at least as often, new startups are founded by startup employees. That's exactly what happened with LiveFlow.

A few years ago, Anita Koimur led the rewards program at fintech unicorn Revolut, while Kalkar was its country manager for the Nordic region.

They kept in touch over the years, and later as co-founders, came up with the idea for LiveFlow. They then took the startup through the Y Combinator accelerator and later raised a seed round in 2021.

Joined by former Web Summit engineering lead Evan O’Brien, Koimur and Kalkar now plan to expand in the U.S with a base in New York. The company now counts accounting firms like BDO and KLR, as well as Wendy’s and Crumbl Cookies as customers.

Its newest product, LiveFlow Next, is designed to help accounting firms do more advisory work.

In a statement, Valar’s founding partner, James Fitzgerald, said, “LiveFlow helps save countless hours per month while also eliminating human error.”

Although LiveFlow does have competitors, none seem to be venture-backed right now. Fathom, out of Australia, does something similar, but it appears not to have raised VC funding, while Reach Reporting in the U.S. is in a similar position, according to Crunchbase.