Molly Liu and Aman Puri are tackling the U.S. accounting shortage from a different angle โ a global one. On Monday, the co-founders announced that Mavi, their AI-powered talent marketplace founded in 2023, has officially emerged from stealth. The service connects and onboards U.S. companies with AI-proficient global finance and accounting talent within days.
A Shrinking Profession Meets a Rising AI Bar
Speaking to TechCrunch, Liu, the company's co-CEO, outlined the problems facing the U.S. accounting industry. The profession is shrinking, and even those who remain are not necessarily fluent in the AI skills their enterprises now require. At the same time, many U.S. companies remain wary of working with global talent โ either because hiring and managing it is complex, or because they doubt 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.," Liu said of the global workforce.
That is where Mavi comes in. According to Liu, the platform also handles the unglamorous logistics of hiring global talent: cross-border contracts, legal and compliance, and even payroll. The company focuses on quickly placing full-time, long-term professionals who augment in-house finance teams, with an emphasis on mid-level and senior-level roles.
Automation Won't Solve the Shortage โ It May Worsen It
Liu has worked at Ramp, Lyft, and Dropbox. Those roles convinced her that more automation tools alone cannot fix accounting's problems.
"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," she said.
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, Liu said she has noticed that the more AI tools a company adopts, the more pressure it puts on senior staff.
"They are increasingly expected to add more of their reasoning skills," she continued. "Finance teams are now being pushed to do more with less."
What It Means to Be an AI-Proficient Accountant
There is another wrinkle: the definition of an accountant is slowly shifting. An AI-proficient accountant, Liu said, has strong finance and accounting fundamentals but can also direct AI tools, apply judgment to catch what AI gets wrong, integrate LLMs into finance and accounting workflows, and work comfortably 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 said.
Traction and Funding
Last year, Mavi raised a $4 million seed round led by Harlem Capital โ a round it did not disclose until Monday. Liu said the company now has more than 3,000 accounting professionals on its platform, with 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."