Atlanta Team Lands $4M Investment To Make The Audit Process Less Painful

When T.C. Whittaker started Audit Sight last year, he and his co-founder Jonathan Womack knew what the startup’s first guiding principle would be: “Everything we build must eliminate work for an auditor.” 

That was something that resonated with the two trained CPAs. 

Whittaker, a Tennessee native and longtime Atlanta resident, took the traditional CPA route out of graduate school and joined PwC, one of the “Big 4” public accounting firms. He knew early on that the audit process was broken for both the accountants and the companies. After launching several other ventures around the startup world, he’s coming back to his roots and working to streamline work for auditors. 

When auditors show up to look at the end-of-year financials and documents for a company, they are often asking for and sifting through hundreds of requests. But those auditors really just have to “cross their fingers” and hope there isn’t any sort of bookkeeping error that could extend the testing process, Whittaker explained to Hypepotamus. 

“It’s a very inefficient thing, because before there was no way to access this data,” Whittaker told Hypepotamus. “Our technology is myopically focused on eliminating the test of details work that auditors have to do.” 

The software works to verify financial transactions by integrating with accounting systems and then connecting that with third-party sources of data to validate.

Streamlining this process then “elevates the auditor so that they get out of the weeds of test of details work and elevates them up to the things that they were trained to do in their master’s classes like test management’s estimates and management’s judgment,” said Whittaker. 

While Audit Sight’s work is ready to make current auditors’ lives easier, it could also help fill an important gap in the labor market. The number of accountants has declined over the years and the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates there could be more than 48,000 unfilled auditor positions in the US by 2030. 

That is something Whittaker has seen and heard firsthand while working with auditors across the country to build this product. Not only are firms struggling to maintain talent, but graduate schools are struggling to attract students.

The team announced today it closed a $4 million seed+ round led by Chicago-based Hyde Park Venture Partners. Hyde Park’s partner Ira Weiss, an accountant and accounting professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, will also come on as an investor.  This follows a $2.5 million seed investment in October of 2021. 

“Our team immediately recognized Audit Sight’s impressive traction selling to accounting firms and proactively extended additional funding following their initial seed round,” Weiss said in a press statement. 

Hyde Park has made other investments in the Atlanta tech ecosystem, including joining the Series A rounds for both Terminus and RoadSync.