YC-Backed Denki Raises $4.1M for AI Auditing
Denki, a YC-backed startup founded by two brothers, has raised $4.1M to automate financial audits using AI. The funding highlights a growing market for ML-driven tools that can handle compliance, document validation, and transaction analysis in fintech.
The $4.1M seed round was co-led by Base10 Partners and Shine Capital, with additional investment from Y Combinator and 20VC. Denki, a participant in YC's Fall 2025 cohort, was founded by brothers Felipe Jin Li, a 24-year-old PhD researcher in Explainable AI, and David Jin Li, a 20-year-old computer science student who built financial data pipelines. The founders' key insight was that auditors spend 80% of their time on manual evidence collection and only 20% on actual skilled judgment. Their platform is built to directly address this by automating compliance for regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) and anti-money laundering (BSA
