Benford, a tech-native financial audit startup, has raised £4.3 million in pre-seed funding to build a new generation financial audit firm that runs statutory audits end to end, from clients’ systems to the signed opinion. The round was led by firstminute capital, Global Founders Capital, Sondo, and a group of notable software and accounting founders including Øystein Moan, Peter ter Maaten, Arthur Waller, Quentin de Metz, Alexandre Prot and Arild Spandow. Benford is a registered audit firm in Norway with its proprietary engine, AuditOS, live and running client audits today.
European financial audit at the small and mid-market end faces shrinking capacity and rising costs as the largest firms step back, consolidators buy practices faster than they can modernise them, local firms lack resources to rebuild their technology stack and the profession retires faster than it recruits, while audit fees keep increasing. Benford is vertically integrated, starting from the audit work and building the technology to deliver it so that routine work is done by systems while judgement remains with people. Benford holds the audit licence, builds the platform and employs the qualified auditor who scopes each engagement, rules on every exception and signs the opinion.
AuditOS connects directly to the systems a company runs on, including ERP, subledgers, invoices, banks and other operational systems, to build a single audit brain that deepens through each engagement. Every test runs against this audit brain, every input is logged, traced to its source and assigned to a named auditor. Follow-ups sit in a single collaborative interface designed to cut the hours finance teams spend facilitating audits, which Benford describes as 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 work is carried from one year to the next so subsequent audits start where the previous one finished.
Benford was founded by Palantir, Goldman Sachs and One Peak alumni Mads Bogen Øye, Thibault Mallion and Andreas Rystad. The team has grown from three founders to twenty people, with teams in London and Oslo. Benford plans to use the capital to grow the London and Oslo offices and take the firm into Sweden and further European markets, hiring across audit and engineering roles.
Audit is one of the few services where the customer experience has got worse every year while the bill has gone up. We are not changing what an audit is. We are changing how it is delivered.
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. 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. 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.
Every attempt to modernise audit has been aimed at the auditor's desk. The firm around it was left untouched.
