- Benford has secured €5 million in pre-seed financing, with firstminute capital and Global Founders Capital acting as the lead investors.
- The founders of Pennylane, Qonto, and Amesto are also investors.
- Benford is not merely a software provider for auditors but a licensed Norwegian audit firm.
For 20 years, audit-tech start-ups have focused on selling software to accountants, whereas Benford is taking a different route by becoming a statutory auditor and raising €5 million in pre-seed funding as a result.
The funding round was led by firstminute capital and Global Founders Capital, with Sondo also taking part. Among the other investors are Peter ter Maaten from HSO; Arthur Waller and Quentin de Metz from Pennylane; Alexandre Prot from Qonto; and the Spandow family from Amesto.
Mads Bogen Øye, Thibault Mallion, and Andreas Rystad founded Benford in 2026, the latter having previously worked at Palantir, Goldman Sachs, and One Peak. The company is registered as an audit firm in Norway and employs twenty people in London and Oslo.
As Mallion, co-founder and co-CEO, pointed out, “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.”
Benford’s AuditOS can connect to clients’ ERP systems, subledgers, invoices, and bank feeds to automate tasks that junior auditors normally perform by hand. Benford holds the audit licence, employs the signing auditor, and retains the client evidence. As a result, subsequent audits can be based on the previous work rather than starting again.
The audit industry is valued at $58.68 billion this year and could reach $78.7 billion by 2030, according to The Business Research Company. Benford is concentrating on small and mid-sized companies, a segment which the Big Four are gradually abandoning in favour of consolidators.
The tool-sellers vs. the firms that became auditors
DataSnipper, one of the leading companies in the field, has decided to sell its automation software to Deloitte, EY, KPMG, and PwC, thereby achieving a $1 billion valuation. Benford aims to transform audit firms themselves, not merely auditors’ workflows, and it is not the only one doing so.
Repodo, based in Copenhagen and founded by former Lunar executives, raised €8.2 million in August to adopt the same approach: retain the audit licence and human judgment while automating other tasks. Meanwhile, Cortea in Berlin, with €12 million, and Auditstage in Belgium, with €750,000, concentrate on reviewing audit work rather than providing full audit services.
Michael Stothard, partner at firstminute capital, stated, “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 execute a full end-to-end service in a complex industry. That combination is exactly what it takes to build the next generation of audit.”
David Sainteff, partner at Global Founders Capital, added, “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.”
Benford is going to use €5 million to expand its operations from Norway into Sweden and other parts of Europe, and to employ more people in audit and engineering.
Two well-funded startups currently hold audit licences and are using AI-powered processes in various markets near the Nordics, with support from leading European accounting software companies. It has not yet been determined whether regulators and clients will regard audit opinions prepared with the help of AI in the same way as those produced by well-established firms such as Deloitte.
