Molly Liu and Aman Puri are tackling the U.S. accounting shortage from another angle — a global one, that is. On Monday, they announced that their AI-powered talent marketplace Mavi, founded in 2023, has officially emerged from stealth. The service helps connect and onboard U.S. companies with top AI-proficient global financial and accounting talent within days.
Speaking to TechCrunch, Liu, the company’s co-CEO, pointed out the problems facing the U.S. accounting industry today — mainly that the profession is shrinking and even those left aren’t necessarily fluent in the AI skills needed to help their enterprises grow. At the same time, she said, many U.S. companies don’t like the idea of working with global talent, either because it’s complex to hire and manage them or because they simply don’t think the talent is good enough.
“There’s been a new wave of tremendous talent, a really high bar that is equal or even better than the U.S.,” she said of the global workforce. And that’s where Mavi comes in, which, Liu said, also helps companies handle the unglamorous work that comes with hiring global talent, like managing cross-border contracts, legal and compliance, and even payroll. She said the company focuses on quickly finding full-time, long-term placements that augment in-house finance teams, with a focus on mid-level and senior-level positions.
Liu has worked at Ramp, Lyft, and Dropbox. She said working at these companies made her realize that more automation tools can’t fix all the problems in accounting.
“AI will automate away many entry-level roles in finance and accounting, which will further exacerbate the talent shortage at the mid-level experience level, given there will be less entry-level talent growing into the mid-level over time,” Liu said.
So no matter how many AI tools are released to automate grunt work, companies still need experienced humans to make judgment calls on critical work. In fact, she said, she’s noticed that the more AI tools a company adopts, the more pressure that adds to those in senior roles.
“They are increasingly expected to add more of their reasoning skills,” she continued. “Finance teams are now being pushed to do more with less.”
But there’s another snag — the fact that what it means to be an accountant today is slowly shifting. An AI-proficient accountant, for example, is someone with strong finance and accounting fundamentals, she said, but who can also direct AI tools to do work, apply judgment to catch what AI gets wrong; someone who can integrate LLMs into finance and accounting workflows and is familiar with the latest AI-native ERPs and tools. “A traditional accountant has the accounting fundamentals but only has a basic understanding of how to incorporate AI into finance and workflows or how to review [and] manage AI tools within finance,” she continued.
Last year, the company raised a $4 million seed round led by Harlem Capital, which it had not announced until Monday. Liu says the company now has more than 3,000 accounting professionals on the platform and enterprise clients that include the personal care company Athena Club.
“We have a very strong point of view as to what the future of the finance team looks like,” she said. “The work for us is focusing on that high-skill talent and that new layer of judgment that is paramount to all finance teams and all business functions as a whole, to be able to operate at the next level and beyond.”