Munich Startup: What does Audavis do? What problem does it solve?
Audavis: Auditors are currently under enormous regulatory pressure to audit companies' ever-increasing reporting requirements. At the same time, audits are expected to be increasingly in-depth and detailed, ensuring nothing escapes the auditor's attention. The industry is facing increasingly stringent legal liability obligations, making it increasingly difficult to handle audit engagements cost-effectively and without increased personal liability risk.
This challenging regulatory development is compounded by an increasingly severe shortage of skilled workers. According to a 2022 survey by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), over 33 percent of auditors are older than 60, and 75.3 percent of audit firms are suffering from an acute shortage of skilled workers. In addition, the training period for new auditors, even after completing their studies, is still very long and requires years.
The AudavisBut the platform we have developed at mbiomics is radically different. combines data analysis, AI, and industry expertise to co-pilot auditors throughout the entire audit process. Audavis automates the preparation and AI-supported pre-assessment of complex ERP and accounting data, enabling auditors to save up to 60 percent of their time—a real game changer, especially in times of severe skills shortages in the industry. In addition, instead of the statistical sampling methods often used in the past, Audavis relies on a full audit of all accounting data and identifies particularly conspicuous transactions, allowing auditors to delve deeper and apply their professional expertise in a targeted and effective manner. This significantly reduces the liability risk of overlooking a particularly serious error in the financial data.
In addition, in the second evolutionary step, Audavis will also become interesting for companies as a continuous internal audit activity (Continuous Auditing) for CFOs and internal auditors.
Audavis is a pioneer in AI data processing
Munich Startup: But that's been around for a long time!
Audavis: The market does not currently offer AI-supported, fully automated data preparation for annual financial statement audits; here Audavis is the pioneer and will establish another unique selling point in everyday auditing with the Artificial Auditor.
In the area of data analysis for auditors, there are several data analysis providers on the market that offer solutions with which we have content overlaps. However, these are based on the fact that data analysts have to invest a lot of manual work in preparing and analyzing data, which drives up costs enormously. Audavis, on the other hand, enables the professionally oriented auditor to interact directly with the data without specialist knowledge and without the need for services. We have automated the activities of data engineers and data analysts on our platform. This approach allows us to offer our clients enormous added value at unprecedented cost efficiency. This gives every auditor back control over the accounting material to be audited, which is now hidden in complex data models of various ERP systems such as SAP, Sage, or Datev.
Audavis offers data automation and a wide range of AI solutions for everything from small audit firms to global players and Big 4 audit firms. The Big 4 are working on their own solutions, but these lack auditor ergonomics and don't operate on a neutral platform. We are therefore democratizing data and AI capabilities in auditing, making auditors' technological capabilities independent of the size and budget of their internal development departments.
Idea came at project completion celebration
Munich Startup: What is your founding story?
Audavis: Our co-founder, Philipp Roebruck, worked for nine years as an auditor at a Big 4 firm. After successfully completing his exams, he always felt frustrated at never being able to apply his expertise with a sense of completeness and clarity over all of his clients' accounting and ERP data. It's still common practice today to process large volumes of data for audit purposes using statistical samples, but this often lacks an overview of the entire population and its various subpopulations and processes. Philipp therefore developed his expertise in the field of Audit Data & Analytics and later in Forensic Data & Analytics, where he used advanced big data analysis techniques and AI models to gain precisely this complete overview. During this work, he met his co-founders Benjamin Aunkofer and Otrek Wilke as part of a project. Over a pleasant dinner to celebrate the successful completion of a project, we ultimately asked ourselves: How do medium-sized companies, with a 70 percent market share and no large IT departments of their own, actually use these technologies in auditing? This gave birth to the idea for Audavis, which we want to project onto the entire audit market.
Sustainable software development
Munich Startup: What have been your biggest challenges so far?
Audavis: Audavis has an extremely high degree of automation and scales completely horizontally. This naturally makes the development process extremely challenging. Given the mix of technologies we use and those we develop ourselves, we're entering relatively new territory in some areas and have to learn to fend for ourselves. We also consciously decided against building something that we know will work for now, knowing that we'll have to completely redo everything later. We opted for sustainable software development straight away, but that requires enormous staying power and a high level of resilience. Furthermore, it's harder to convince investors of an idea when you only have a demo and a few letters of intent than when you've already generated initial revenue. However, we're convinced that this path will pay dividends this year.
Munich Startup: Where would you like to be in one year, where in five years?
Audavis: We are currently in the process of making our platform's core functionality available to a select group of innovative auditors. We aim to complete this very cautious market launch by the end of Q2 of the year and make the platform freely available to the entire market. At the same time, by the end of the year, we will have technically implemented all remaining features for comprehensive co-piloting of the entire audit process, offering our clients an unprecedented experience for leveraging their professional skills. In three to five years, we aim to become the industry standard, ensuring that all auditors, regardless of their firm size, can use state-of-the-art technology for their annual financial statement audits.
Munich offers an incomparable ecosystem
Munich Startup: How have you experienced Munich as a startup location so far?
Audavis: Munich offers an unparalleled ecosystem. The three of us founders all come from highly specialized, professionally driven professions, and entrepreneurship was completely new territory for us at the time. However, in Munich, we received support and coaching from Baystartup very early on. At the same time, we were connected with various venture capitalists and business angels and were able to test the response to our idea in the Munich Business Plan Competition. I think it's incredibly important that organizations like Baystartup make it easier for first-time founders like us to be introduced to the startup world and make 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 the most peripheral areas should be outsourced, and that young companies, in particular, should maintain a small but highly effective core of experts within the company.
