Munich Startup: What does Audavis do? What problem are you solving?
Audavis: Auditors currently face enormous regulatory pressure to review ever-new reporting obligations from companies. At the same time, it is expected that the audit becomes increasingly thorough and detailed so nothing escapes the auditor’s attention. For the industry, increasingly stringent legal liability obligations are being added, making it increasingly difficult to handle audit engagements economically and without increased personal liability risk.
In this difficult regulatory environment, an increasingly severe shortage of skilled workers is emerging. According to a 2022 FAZ survey, over 33 percent of auditors are older than 60 years, and 75.3 percent of audit firms are suffering from acute labor shortages. Additionally, the training period for new auditors still requires years even after completing their degree, making it very lengthy.
The Audavis platform combines data analysis, AI, and industry expertise to co-pilot auditors throughout the entire audit process. Audavis automates the preparation and AI-based preliminary assessment of complex ERP and accounting data, allowing auditors to save up to 60 percent of working time – a real game changer especially in times of severe labor shortages in the industry. Additionally, instead of using statistical sampling methods as has often been done, Audavis performs a full audit of all accounting data and identifies particularly striking transactions so auditors can dig deeper and deploy their professional expertise in a targeted and effective manner. This significantly reduces the liability risk of overlooking a major error in the financial data.
Furthermore, in the second evolutionary step, Audavis will also become interesting for companies as continuous internal audit activities (continuous auditing) for CFOs and internal audit departments.
Audavis is a pioneer in AI data preparation
Munich Startup: But that already exists!
Audavis: The market currently offers no AI-powered, fully automated data preparation for financial statement audits – Audavis is the pioneer here and will establish another unique selling point in everyday auditing with the Artificial Auditor.
In the area of data analysis for auditors, there are some data analysis providers on the market offering solutions with which we have content overlaps. However, these are based on the fact that data analysts must invest a lot of manual work in data preparation and analysis, which drives costs enormously. Audavis, on the other hand, enables the professionally oriented auditor to interact directly with data without specialized knowledge, without needing to use external services. We have automated the tasks of data engineers and data analysts on our platform. Through this approach, we can offer our customers enormous added value at unprecedented cost efficiency. This gives every auditor control over the transaction data to be audited, which nowadays is hidden in complex data models of various ERP systems such as SAP, Sage, or Datev.
Audavis offers data automation and many AI solutions for small audit firms right up to global players and Big-4 audit firms. The Big-4 are working on their own solutions, but these don’t offer the ergonomics for auditors and don’t operate on a neutral platform. We thus ensure democratization of data and AI capabilities in auditing and make technological capabilities independent of the size and budget of internal development departments.
Idea came at project completion celebration
Munich Startup: What’s your founding story?
Audavis: Our co-founder Philipp Roebruck worked as an auditor at a Big-4 firm for nine years and after successfully passing his exam always felt frustration at never being able to apply his expertise with a sense of absolute overview of all accounting and ERP data of his clients. Today it is still common to process large amounts of data through statistical sampling, but this often lacks overview of the population and its various subpopulations and processes. Philipp therefore developed further into the area of audit data & analytics and later into forensic data & analytics, where he then used advanced mass data analysis techniques and AI models to gain exactly this overview. During this work, he met co-founders Benjamin Aunkofer and Otrek Wilke during a project. At a nice dinner celebrating the completion of a successful project, the question ultimately came up: How does the mid-market actually use these technologies in auditing with its 70 percent market share without large in-house IT departments? That’s how the idea for Audavis was born, which we want to project across the entire audit market.
Sustainable software development
Munich Startup: What have been your biggest challenges so far?
Audavis: Audavis has an enormously high degree of automation and scales completely horizontally. This certainly makes the development process extremely challenging. In combining the technologies we use and develop ourselves, we’re breaking new ground in some areas and have to rely on our own resources. We also deliberately decided against building something that we knew would work for now, knowing we’d have to completely remake things later. We opted directly for sustainable software development, which requires enormous perseverance and high resilience. Additionally, it’s harder to convince investors of an idea when you only have a demo and some letters of intent compared to having initial revenues. But we are convinced that this path will pay dividends this year.
Munich Startup: Where do you want to be in one year, and where in five years?
Audavis: Currently we are making the core functionalities of our platform accessible to the first very selectively chosen innovative auditors. We want to complete this very cautious market launch by the end of Q2 of this year and make the platform freely available to the entire market. In parallel, by the end of the year we will have technically implemented all remaining features for comprehensive co-piloting of the entire audit process and will offer our customers an unprecedented experience to showcase their professional capabilities. In three to five years, we want to become industry standard and ensure that all auditors, regardless of the size of their firm, can use state-of-the-art technology for their financial statement audits.
Munich offers an unparalleled ecosystem
Munich Startup: How have you experienced Munich as a startup location so far?
Audavis: Munich offers an unparalleled ecosystem. We three founders all come from highly specialized professionally driven careers and entrepreneurship was completely new territory for us back then. In Munich, however, we received support and coaching very early from Baystartup, and in parallel we were introduced to various venture capitalists and business angels and were able to test the resonance for our idea at the Munich business plan competition. I think it is enormously important that first-time founders like us are helped by organizations like Baystartup in introducing us to the startup world and making initial contact with the relevant players.
Munich Startup: Outsource or do it yourself?
Audavis: We develop all our software in-house. We believe that only absolute fringe areas should be outsourced and young companies especially should have a small but very effective core of knowledge holders in the company.
