Denki, which has built AI-powered software for financial auditors at public companies, has raised $4.1 million in funding, the startup tells Crunchbase News exclusively.
Founded in 2025 by brothers Felipe Jin Li (24) and David Jin Li (20), San Francisco-based Denki aims to build “modern” infrastructure for financial audits, which verify that financial statements are accurate and controls are functioning. The startup wants to help replace manual, “evidence-heavy” processes with software automation that makes audits run more like code.
“Denki helps auditors review and prepare evidence more quickly, document their work more effectively, and test process controls more rigorously,” CEO Felipe told Crunchbase News. “With higher risk coverage and reduced costs, public companies can comply better with financial regulations.”
Base10 Partners and Shine Capital co-led the raise, which included participation from Y Combinator, 20VC and others. Denki also participated in YC’s Fall 2025 cohort.
The raise comes amid a broader surge in funding to fintech startups, particularly those that apply AI in their offerings. Global funding to VC-backed financial technology startups totaled $52.9 billion in 2025, per Crunchbase data. That’s a 27% increase from 2024’s total of $41.6 billion raised.
Interestingly, the most-active investor in the space by far all year, in terms of deal volume, was Denki backer Y Combinator, which participated in 151 fintech startup deals last year. That’s up 24.8% compared to the 121 deals it wrote checks into in 2024.
Landing on capital and an idea
The two brothers grew up in Spain and the U.K. Upon moving to London to study computer science, the pair participated in hackathons organized by Meta, OpenAI, ElevenLabs and VC-sponsored programs, and won several competitions.
“That opened up opportunities, including being offered a $135,000 pre-seed check before we had an idea, which we declined,” Felipe recalls.
The brothers eventually accepted a small angel check from a former staff research scientist at DeepMind, which gave them a few months of runway to explore ideas before being accepted into the Y Combinator Fall 2025 batch.
“We spent time digging into compliance and landed on audit. It is a technically rich problem, with large volumes of unstructured data, high regulatory stakes and very little modernization in tooling,” Felipe said. “It also connected naturally to what we had each been doing.”
David was building financial data pipelines at Macro Hive — a company trusted by top hedge funds — turning messy data into usable information. Felipe was working on his Ph.D. in explainable AI at University College London, evaluating vision-language models and making black-box systems “interpretable.”
They discovered that a common approach to addressing all the manual work required by auditors was to build Excel extensions designed to make audit work faster.
“We believe it is worth changing the status quo by moving away from Excel as the primary workspace,” Felipe said.
Denki, he said, offers cleaner logs and less room for sample manipulation. Also, because the brothers have a research background, they are “constantly” staying on top of new concerns.
“One major audit risk today is AI fraud,” said Felipe. “There is promising research on detecting forged AI-generated receipts using invisible watermarks, and translating that research into something auditors can actually use is a big part of what we do.”
Denki makes money by offering a tiered SaaS annual contract that depends on the number of controls automated, team size and other integration factors. Its customers are pre-IPO and publicly traded companies.
Building for a ‘high-stress industry’ under scrutiny
Denki’s founders believe their solution is timely. Last year, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board imposed the third-highest cumulative penalties in its 21-year enforcement history, totaling $17.7 million, according to a Thomson Reuters report. That was after issuing a record $35.7 million in penalties in 2024. The Jin Li brothers believe those metrics signal that “scrutiny is intensifying even as traditional methods strain under complexity.”
For now, Denki is a two-person company, but it plans to hire engineers and auditors with its new capital.
Ade Ajao, Base10 Partners co-founder and managing partner, told Crunchbase News that his firm was impressed by the brothers’ “passion for the industry” and their focus on automating “very discrete tasks” for auditors.
“It was unusual to see such young people so strongly empathetic to issues in auditing but it was clear they were determined to build something great for this industry,” he wrote via email.
“But also it’s a large market that is burdened with labor supply constraints (which is not getting any better), in a high-stress industry with ever increasing scrutiny.”
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
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