In her previous position at Visa, Bhavana Ravindran assisted clients in implementing digital payment solutions for consumers and SMEs. She discovered that while consumer payment experiences had advanced, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) were still using outdated financial management tools.
“It wasn’t until I started my first business that I experienced the pain of this finance admin headache,” she tells e27. “My discussions with other founders revealed similar frustrations; many spend over 15 hours a week on various finance operations like payment tracking, bookkeeping, and logging receipts, as well as facing challenges with year-end compliance reporting and tax filings.”
Existing tools were too complex and out-of-date because they were created by accountants for accountants. As a result, SMEs had to pay significant amounts to accounting firms to handle their administrative tasks.
These insights motivated Ravindran to address this underserved multi-billion dollar market by establishing a fintech startup. “Earlybird AI’s goal is to empower SMEs to reduce the time spent on finance admin and increase focus on their customers,” states the founder and CEO.
Also Read: Earlybird AI secures Antler-led funding to simplify finance admin for SMEs
Ravindran is a serial entrepreneur who has founded two startups in the past – Chicago Booth Tech For Good and Dina. Previously, she spent eight years at Visa, holding key positions including Director (Digital Solutions and Product Co-creations).
Headquartered in Singapore, Earlybird AI aims to streamline the bookkeeping and financial admin tasks of SMEs, making them painless, stress-free, and intuitive while providing real-time insights into the business. The app also functions as a CFO, transforming mundane admin tasks into valuable insights, reports, and recommendations.
Essentially, Earlybird converts routine bookkeeping into valuable insights. “We leverage the power of large language models (LLMs) to automate business payment events into bookkeeping ledger entries, financial reports, trends, analytics, personalized growth intelligence, and cost-cutting recommendations tailored to business personas,” adds Ravindran.
The tech team spent months training LLM agents with a proprietary Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)-based architecture. “Essentially, every financial report can be deconstructed using LLMs to link back to the chart of accounts. By combining this business logic with LLMs, we have a revolutionary solution that reduces manual effort in reporting processes. Our alpha testing has achieved over 99% accuracy in the last eight weeks,” she claims.
Recently emerging from stealth mode, Earlybird – which won the Asia Startup Network Angels Arena pitch event earlier this month – reports a 30% weekly growth in beta test users.
Earlybird founder and CEO Bhavana Ravindran
Earlybird primarily serves solopreneurs and founders of early-stage startups and e-commerce businesses. According to Ravindran, these personas face similar financial reporting, compliance, and tax requirements in the early stages of operation, and tools like Earlybird help them be efficient and automate tasks.
The product is priced competitively compared to globally recognized solutions like Xero. Additionally, Earlybird eliminates the need for clients to spend more on hiring accounting firms to manage admin and bookkeeping tasks.
Also Read: A new insights attitude for SMEs in the era of the ‘insights engine’
The fintech startup recently secured an undisclosed amount in a pre-seed funding round led by Antler with participation from strategic angels. The funding will help accelerate the venture’s go-to-market strategy, develop the minimum-viable product, and recruit top-quality design, engineering, and AI talent.
“Founders shape the future of our society, but they are currently bogged down by admin-heavy, poorly designed bookkeeping tools and low-value operational tasks,” she says.
“By tackling the multi-billion dollar SME accounting and finance admin industry, we can drive innovation and growth by enabling founders to concentrate on what they do best – growing their business. Looking forward, we will continuously evolve our product roadmap to deliver user-centric solutions using the latest AI innovations,” she concludes.
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