Hi YC 🫡

We’re Kieran, Aahel and Max from Midship and we are building AI agents that accelerate financial audits. With Midship, you can go from a folder of 100 unorganized PDF documents to a draft work paper in minutes, rather than days.

Our agents target low-complexity, document based auditing tasks, such as matching invoices to ledger items and checking correctness of dates on receipts. They collect and link evidence at every step, making all work quickly verifiable.

Our launch video makes the bold claim that our platform will break up the stranglehold the Big 4 (Deloitte, EY, PWC, KPMG) have on the audit market:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-8_NwHYgCQ

Problem

Everyone gets audited

Every public company in the US requires a yearly audit of their financial statements by an accredited auditor. These require an auditor to gather evidence that a company’s financial statements are accurate and complete, to a reasonable level of assurance.

Everything is a PDF

As the auditor is external, getting the data invariably means receiving many PDFs of financial documents, such as invoices, purchase order and receipts. Until recently, there was no way to reliably extract and process the data from these documents, meaning a human had to go through each of the documents by hand.

Audit workflows are painful

Beyond the time spent on an individual audit, the audit profession as a whole is feeling the ramifications of these quality of life issues. One look at /r/accounting will show you the frustration auditors are feeling with long hours, especially during busy season (right now).

Solution

With the advent of modern vision language models (VLMs), we can extract data from these financial documents and process them as if we had a direct integration with the clients accounting and ERP systems.

A task such as “find the correct invoice for each of these 50 samples” goes from hours of manual work to a few minutes of VLM processing.

We then go one level further with agents performing audit tests from plans written in natural language. For example, an auditor may plan to check that for each sample, “all amounts match between documents”. Midship performs this check, links to evidence in the source documents and highlights anything that requires review by an auditor.

We have a web app:

And a native Excel add-in with all the same functionality:

Our ask

If you have worked with a auditor from outside the Big-4 in a current or recent role, we would love to talk to them.

Contact us at: founders@midship.ai