- Key insight: Here's why the automation of entry-level accounting roles is shifting mid-level hiring dynamics.
- What's at stake: Mid-market companies trying to scale their finance teams as domestic talent pools shrink.
- Expert quote: "The talent shortage... will actually only get worse and worse." — Aman Puri, co-CEO, MAVI
MAVI unveiled an "AI-driven modern finance talent engine" this week connecting U.S. companies with a network of over 3,000 pre-vetted, AI-proficient finance and accounting professionals from more than 20 countries.
The company, based in San Francisco, manages onboarding, compliance and payments once a match has been made. It was founded in 2023 and has scored nearly $4 million in funding from a group of venture capital firms, including Harlem Capital, Rethink Capital and SNR VC. Its customers include private equity and venture-backed firms, as well as public companies and CFO advisory firms, such as Athena Club, MotherDuck and Within.
"We wanted to build a modern platform that's technology driven that actually meets the needs of customers and finance leaders," said co-CEO Aman Puri. "We have a massive network of talent that we are constantly sourcing, rigorously vetting through a proprietary process we've developed, and then matching with companies to fill in-house roles in their team, whether it be the staff accountant, senior accountant, assistant controller or, on the FP&A side, junior FP&A analyst, senior FP&A analyst and FP&A manager. We're ultimately trying to help finance leaders at mid-market companies build their in-house teams and overcome this talent shortage that we're seeing."
The company sees itself as different from a staffing, outsourcing or offshoring provider.
"It's actually quite different from outsourcing," said co-CEO Molly Liu. "Traditional outsourcing models and staff models don't have the most positive connotations associated with them because they're associated with low-quality, low-skilled talent working on simple tasks. Especially in the finance industry, these are tasks like bookkeeping, AP data entry, things that you wouldn't normally see being automated today in the world of AI. For us, our model is different than the outsourcing model. We actually place the in-house talent, and then we manage all the back-end contracting, payments and compliance. But this person is working with the company. They're part of their in-house team versus the work being shipped off to a random location, and you don't know who's working on it, and then it just gets shipped back. We focus on high-skilled talent. These people are embedded within teams. They apply judgment. They're focused on the reasoning layer, and they make sure that when it comes to a finance org, they are not just getting the transactional stuff completed and accurately done. They're also partners with the CFOs, with finance leaders, on how to take the business in different directions, and how to analyze the metrics that we have seen in finance."
According to the company's own internal cost comparisons, its global talent model cuts annual costs by 50% or more, compared with hiring professionals for equivalent U.S.-based roles, including fees and professional compensation, without the usual staffing-agency placement fees.
"We are connecting pre-vetted high-quality talent and placing them on our customers' team, filling in-house open roles in their team," said Puri. "Then we're also managing the contract payments and compliance on the back end. For a U.S. mid-market business, they may not have the infrastructure to figure out how to hire, pay and contract someone somewhere else in the world. We handle that overhead for them, but for all other intents and purposes, this person is an in-house member of their team who's working remotely. For our customers and the companies we work with, the experience is the same as hiring someone remotely in the U.S."
The remote employees come from over 20 nations, mainly in Latin America and the Asia Pacific region, but not the U.S., even though MAVI's customers are U.S. companies and its accountants are using U.S. GAAP.
"We haven't yet expanded our talent network to the U.S.," said Liu. "We might do so in the future. We're actively talking about it, but right now they are located in different parts of the world. But they are high-caliber talent. There's no overlap in our talent with offshoring firms, agencies and so forth. They're two completely separate pools."
"These are people who've worked with U.S. companies, have done finance and accounting, and we're placing them for in-house remote roles with U.S. companies," said Puri. "What we're ultimately providing to U.S. companies is U.S. caliber talent that are U.S. GAAP trained and know NetSuite, QuickBooks and all the U.S. tools, but at a cost that'll be 50% less, so that provides a tremendous ROI to them on their financing. They're getting high-caliber talent that just happens to be lower cost."
Alleviating the accounting shortage
MAVI says it's helping address the accounting talent shortage. The company noted that unemployment rates across business and financial operations occupations were approximately 2.7% in 2025, compared with 4.3% across the total workforce, according to
"The big reason why we started this was the massive accountant shortage that we're seeing in North America, and the fact that it's just becoming incredibly hard to find great talent in the U.S.," said Puri. As a starting point, what we're doing as a platform is finding U.S.-caliber, U.S. GAAP-trained talent all over the world and placing them into roles with U.S. companies. That is our current focus because that's where we see the biggest gap and a chance."
"It's not displacing any U.S.-based accountants," Liu insisted. "We're not displacing any jobs, any roles. For us, there is a shortage in the U.S. and we've found that there is a large pool of high-skilled U.S.-caliber talent internationally that would really succeed in a role within U.S. companies."
Leveraging AI
The growing use of AI is not making up for the talent shortage. "Recent data and surveys talk about how mid-level roles are becoming increasingly difficult to fill, and hiring high-quality, experienced mid-level talent, like the senior accountant through assistant controller, FP&A analyst through senior FP&A manager, is becoming very hard to fill," said Puri. "We actually see with the advent of AI, that segment will become even harder to fill because what AI is doing is actually automating away the entry-level roles. If there's less entry-level talent, there will be less people who then graduate into becoming experienced in mid-level. We actually see that the talent shortage that is currently apparent will actually only get worse and worse. That's why there needs to be better solutions and new models for how to think about how financing is going to build their future modern team, and that's part of what we're helping them solve."
The company is leveraging AI, but as a way to interview and vet candidates, not do their jobs for them..
"We spent a lot of time refining what we call our matching intelligence product, which encompasses both our sourcing and our vetting product within our entire technology platform," said Liu. "We're not like traditional recruiting models or traditional agencies that reach out to candidates and then they just send over resumes to whatever company is hiring and then charge a placement fee. For us, our entire system is a technology platform. What we have built in both our outreach process and our vetting process, we use a first layer of AI that interviews every single individual, specifically focused on their unique financial and accounting abilities, and also tailors to their skill sets to understand their technical knowledge, their U.S. GAAP knowledge, and also any other types of examples in which they've succeeded in the workplace environment to demonstrate growth mentality and critical thinking skills. We then have a layer of human experts that further evaluates each of these candidates as a combination of AI and human experts to ensure that we fully vet all the candidates that are going through our funnel, allowing us to quickly accept only the top 2% of the talent that have applied, and bring them into MAVI."
The AI helps match the right candidates to the available jobs. "From there, we then leverage our matching intelligence product, which essentially takes all the information that we have across the talent, not just their resumes and their LinkedIn, but also their interview, their performance, their skills, knowledge, their ability to handle various types of like workflows across different past experiences, and we take all that information, and also if they have available engagements with certain customers of ours and that feedback, and we put it into a whole system where we surface the top candidates for a an open role within a company," said Liu. "We don't just match on their technical abilities and their skill sets. We also match on cultural fit, so we can ensure that when we present these candidates to the companies, it is the top two matches. And what we've seen through our own data, when we present two people out of our talent network for an open role that a company is hiring for, 90% of the time, they choose someone within the first two that we send over because the fit is so strong."
MAVI has worked with hundreds of different companies across hundreds of engagements, but relatively few accounting firms aside from CFO services firms that provide fractional finance and accounting services to slightly larger businesses. "Our customers are largely mid-market venture-backed and private equity-backed companies," said Puri.
Its customers range across various industries including SaaS technology, healthcare, manufacturing, IT services, consumer packaged goods, retail e-commerce and real estate. Puri said the company's revenue grew tenfold in its first year and has more than tripled in the past couple of years since its founding in late 2023.
Much of its business has come from referrals, but now the company is beginning to market its services with a formal announcement on Monday.
"We've been able to get to where we are today with several hundred customers without even making a public announcement," said Liu. "A lot of that is driven by how this problem has impacted finance teams today. For us, especially with this public debut, we want to continue to focus very narrowly within the finance sort team structure and the finance roles, going deep into accounting, deep into FP&A, deep into how these roles are evolving with the AI getting better and better. We're training our talent in the field of AI, so they can be more proficient leveraging these tools in their existing workplace and in their respective roles. That's one big milestone for us to hit next. Right now we're focused on finding AI-proficient talent, but we are also launching a new educational initiative to make sure that we're training people on a continuous basis because the world is changing so fast, and you have to keep up. For us, that is the next chapter as we expand, not just to other countries for the talent, but also making sure the talent is becoming more and more skilled in leveraging AI."
Introductory bullet points created by AI with editorial review.
