In her last role at Visa, Bhavana Ravindran helped clients implement digital payment solutions for consumers and SMEs. She realised that while consumer payment experiences have improved in recent years, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are still stuck with outdated financial management tools.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 conversations 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 a lot of pain in year-end compliance reporting and tax filings.”
Existing tools were too complicated and old-fashioned because they were designed by accountants for accountants. Because of this, SMEs had to pay hefty sums to accounting firms to manage their admin stuff.
These insights led Ravindran to tackle this multi-billion dollar underserved market by founding a fintech startup. “Earlybird AI’s vision is to empower SMEs to spend less time on finance admin and more time on their customers,” says 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 and held key roles, including Director (Digital Solutions and Product Co-creations).
Based in Singapore, Earlybird AI aims to make bookkeeping and financial admin tasks of SMEs painless, stress-free, and intuitive while giving real-time visibility into the business. The app also doubles as a CFO, transforming boring, low-value admin tasks into high-value insights, reports, and recommendations.
Essentially, Earlybird transforms routine bookkeeping into high-value insights. “We leverage the power of large language models (LLMS) to translate routine business payment events into automated bookkeeping ledger entries, financial reports, trends and analytics, personalised growth intelligence tailored to business persona profiles and recommendations to trim costs,” 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 usng LLMs to tie back to the chart of accounts. By combining this business logic with the power of LLMs, we have a game-changing solution that removes much of the manual hassle in these reporting processes today. We have reached over 99 per cent accuracy in the last eight weeks of alpha testing,” she claims.
Just out of stealth, Earlybird — which won the Asia Startup Network Angels Arena pitch event earlier this month — claims it currently grows beta test users by 30 per cent week over week.
Earlybird founder and CEO Bhavana Ravindran
Earlybird mainly caters to solopreneurs and founders of early-stage startups and e-commerce firms. In her view, these personas’ financial reporting, compliance, and tax needs are similar in the early stages of operations, and tools like Earlybird enable them to be productive and deliver automation benefits.
The product is competitively priced compared with globally known solutions like Xero. In addition, Earlybird replaces the need for clients to spend more money 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 sum in a pre-seed funding round led by Antler with participation from several unnamed strategic angels. The money will help the venture accelerate its go-to-market and minimum-viable product release development and hire top-quality design, engineering, and AI talent.
“Founders build the future of our society, but they are currently overwhelmed by admin-heavy, poorly designed bookkeeping tools and low-value operational tasks,” she says.
“By taking on the multi-billion dollar SME accounting and finance admin industry, we can enable innovation and growth by enabling the founders to focus on what they do best – growing their business. Looking ahead, we will constantly evolve our product roadmap to deliver user-centric solutions executed using the latest AI innovations,” she concludes.
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