Fintech Benford announced today that it raised €5m in pre-seed funding to build a new-generation, tech-native financial audit firm that runs statutory audits end to end, from clients’ systems to the signed opinion. Instead of selling software to auditors, Benford becomes the auditor.
The round was led by firstminute capital, Global Founders Capital, Sondo, and the people who built the software the accounting profession runs on today:
- Peter ter Maaten (HSO),
- Arthur Waller and Quentin de Metz (Pennylane),
- Alexandre Prot (Qonto),
- the Spandow family (Amesto), and others.
Benford is a registered audit firm in Norway with its proprietary engine, AuditOS, live and running client audits today.
The company was founded by Mads Bogen Øye, Thibault Mallion and Andreas Rystad, alumni of Palantir, Goldman Sachs and One Peak.
European financial audit has been abandoned at the small and mid-market end. The largest firms are stepping back, consolidators are buying practices faster than they can modernise them, local firms rarely have the resources to rebuild their stack, and the profession is retiring faster than it recruits. Yet audit fees keep increasing.
"Audit is one of the few services where the customer experience has gotten worse every year while the bill has gone up," said Thibault Mallion, co-founder and co-CEO of Benford.
"We are not changing what an audit is. We are changing how it is delivered."
"Every attempt to modernise audit has been aimed at the auditor's desk. The firm around it was left untouched,” explains Mads Bogen Øye, co-founder and co-CEO of Benford.
Benford is vertically integrated: it starts with audit work and builds the technology to deliver it, opening a new paradigm where systems do the routine work while judgement remains with people. The company holds the licence, builds the platform, and employs qualified auditors who scope each engagement, rule on every exception, and sign the opinion.
Benford’s AuditOS connects to the systems a company runs on: ERP, subledgers, invoices, banks and other operational systems to build a single audit brain which deepens through each engagement. Every test runs against it, every input is logged, traced to its source and assigned to a named auditor.
Follow-ups live in a single collaborative interface, cutting the hours finance teams lose to audit: the part of the total cost of audit that never shows up on the invoice. Each audit is scoped to what the company needs, and the work is carried from one year to the next so the second audit starts where the first finished.
“For twenty years, innovation in audit has meant selling tools to auditors, and most audits are still done the old way. Audit is a huge, structurally overlooked market that nobody has tried to rebuild from first principles,” said Michael Stothard, partner at firstminute capital.
“The Big Four are pulling back from the mid-market, and the technology to do this properly has only just arrived.
Mads, Thibault and Andreas are the rare team that can both build the software and handle the execution of a full end-to-end service in a complex industry. That combination is exactly what it takes to build the next generation of audit.”
“No process is better suited to automation than audit’s groundwork, and few are less automated,” said David Sainteff, Partner at GFC.
“It is the clients who pay the price, both in fees and in the internal hours spent facilitating a process that software should be doing.”
The funding raised will grow the London and Oslo offices and take the firm into Sweden and further European markets. Benford is hiring across audit and engineering to build the audit firm of the next decade.
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