Benford announces today that it has raised €5m in pre-seed funding to build a new generation tech-native financial audit firm, running the statutory audit end to end, from the 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 [source]. 

"Audit is one of the few services where the customer experience has got 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: starting from the audit work and building the technology to deliver it, opening a new paradigm where the routine work is done by systems, while judgement remains with people. Benford holds the licence, builds the platform and employs the qualified auditor who scopes each engagement, rules on every exception and signs 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.”

Benford is a team of twenty people, and the capital 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. 

Notable investors 

• Peter ter Maaten, founder of HSO, one of the world's leading independent Microsoft Dynamics partners, backed by Carlyle and now Bain Capital

• Arthur Waller and Quentin de Metz, co-founders of Pennylane, France's €3.6bn accounting platform used by >1 million businesses and 6,000 accounting firms

• Alexandre Prot, co-founder and CEO of Qonto, Europe's leading business banking platform for SMEs, with 600,000+ customers across eight countries

• The Spandow family, founders of Amesto, the family-owned Nordic accounting and business services group

About Benford

Benford is a new generation tech-native audit firm that runs the statutory audit end to end. Instead of selling software to auditors, Benford is the auditor: it holds the licence, builds the platform and employs the auditor who signs it. Its proprietary engine, AuditOS, connects to a company's systems, gathers the evidence and carries the work from one year to the next, so routine work is done by systems while judgement stays with people. A qualified auditor scopes every engagement, rules on exceptions and signs the opinion. The target is a lower total cost of audit, with no compromise on quality. Founded by Mads Bogen Øye, Thibault Mallion and Andreas Rystad, alumni of Palantir, Goldman Sachs and One Peak, Benford is a registered audit firm live in Norway, with teams in London and Oslo, backed by firstminute capital, Global Founders Capital, Sondo and the founders of HSO, Pennylane, Qonto and Amesto. For more information, visit benford.tech. 

About firstminute capital

firstminute capital is a $500 million seed fund that invests in high-ambition founders building foundational technology. Backed by a powerful ecosystem of over 130 unicorn founders, the firm acts as the first institutional partner for early-stage technology companies across Europe and the US. For more information, visit firstminute.capital.

About Global Founders Capital

Global Founders Capital is a venture capital fund backing many of the world's fastest-growing and most valuable technology companies, including Meta, Revolut, Deel, Kalshi, Databricks, Canva and Pennylane. GFC invests early and across sectors, partnering with exceptional founders from day one.