Mavi emerges from stealth with AI talent marketplace

Molly Liu and Aman Puri are tackling the U.S. accounting shortage from a global angle. On Monday, they announced that their AI-powered talent marketplace, Mavi, founded in 2023, has officially emerged from stealth. The service helps connect and onboard U.S. companies with AI-proficient global financial and accounting talent within days.

Liu, the company’s co-CEO, said the U.S. accounting profession is shrinking, and those who remain aren’t necessarily fluent in the AI skills their employers now need. At the same time, she said, many U.S. companies are wary of hiring global talent, either because it’s complex to manage or because they doubt the talent is good enough — even though, in her view, “there’s been a new wave of tremendous talent, a really high bar that is equal or even better than the U.S.” Mavi also handles the less glamorous work of hiring across borders, including cross-border contracts, legal and compliance, and payroll, with a focus on full-time, long-term placements that augment in-house finance teams at the mid- and senior-level.

Liu, who has worked at Ramp, Lyft and Dropbox, said those roles convinced her that automation tools alone can’t 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 get released to automate grunt work, she argued, companies still need experienced humans to make judgment calls — and the more AI tools a company adopts, the more pressure that puts on people in senior roles, who are increasingly expected to lean on their reasoning skills as finance teams are pushed to do more with less.

What it means to be an accountant is shifting too, Liu said: an AI-proficient accountant needs strong finance and accounting fundamentals, but also has to be able to direct AI tools, apply judgment to catch what AI gets wrong, integrate large language models into finance workflows, and stay current with AI-native ERPs and other tools — unlike a traditional accountant, who may have only a basic understanding of incorporating AI into that work. Mavi raised a $4 million seed round led by Harlem Capital last year, which it had not announced until Monday. The company now has more than 3,000 accounting professionals on its platform and enterprise clients that include personal-care company Athena Club.

Why it matters

Mavi is betting that the accounting talent shortage gets solved by importing AI-fluent finance professionals globally rather than by automating the role away entirely — a wager that AI makes senior judgment scarcer, not less valuable.