Audrey AI announced it has raised $1.8 million in pre-seed funding to scale its purpose-built artificial intelligence platform designed for financial auditors. The round was led by Sure Valley Ventures and Delta Partners, with participation from Enterprise Ireland, Donnchadh Casey, Conor Jones, and a group of former Big Four auditors.
Audrey AI is focused on modernizing financial auditing, a global industry valued at more than $100 billion that remains heavily reliant on manual workflows. Auditors often spend significant time collecting documents, validating data, and performing repetitive testing procedures, limiting their ability to focus on higher-value analysis and judgment.
Founded in 2025 by Ryan Loughran and David Burke, the company has developed an agentic AI platform that automates key components of audit engagements, including evidence gathering and testing. The system is designed to handle complex, unstructured data and adapt to firm-specific methodologies, improving efficiency while maintaining compliance and audit standards.
The platform has already been piloted with top-10 and top-20 audit firms, delivering more than 85% time savings across data collection, validation, and testing processes, alongside improvements in audit quality. Audrey AI’s approach emphasizes learning from each firm’s workflows, enabling the system to become more effective over time.
The new funding will be used to expand the company’s engineering and audit specialist teams, as well as support broader deployment across Ireland, the UK, and additional international markets.
The raise reflects growing demand for vertically tailored AI solutions for highly regulated industries, where general-purpose tools have struggled to address domain-specific complexity.
KEY QUOTES:
“Developers have Copilot, lawyers have Harvey, but auditors still primarily work in Excel. We’re building AI that understands auditing deeply enough to raise the bar on quality, not just speed, freeing auditors to focus on the judgment and oversight that matters most.”
Ryan Loughran, Co-Founder, Audrey AI
“The value of Audrey lies in how it enables a step change in audit quality by redesigning the execution of manual procedures, not by changing our methodology, but by strengthening how it’s applied in practice. That’s the kind of innovation we believe will define the next generation of audit.”
Liam Te-Wierik, Partner And Head Of Digital Assurance, Grant Thornton Australia
“Audrey delivered results from day one, handling the work that takes the most time and enabling broader, deeper audits for our clients.”
John Duffy, Partner, HLB Ireland
“Audrey’s agentic automation platform tackles a critical pressure point for audit firms, chronic talent shortages and margin pressure in a heavily regulated industry. Ryan and David have built a platform that eliminates 80-90% of repetitive work while improving quality. By tailoring to each firm’s methodology, Audrey gives them the unique ability to scale capacity and dramatically improve margins.”
Barry Downes, Managing Partner, Sure Valley Ventures
“Ryan and David have built something that doesn’t just automate tasks but raises the bar on audit quality across the profession. We’re excited to back them.”
Dermot Berkery, Partner, Delta Partners
