Denki Raises $4.1M in Seed Funding to Automate Financial Auditing

Audit season. The two words that make finance teams stare at the ceiling at 2:13 a.m. while a spreadsheet blinks like it knows something you do not. Controls to test. Evidence to collect. Documentation that multiplies faster than rabbits in a carrot factory. The process has been stuck in slow motion for decades, even while the rest of the software world runs at fiber speed. Which makes the timing of Denki feel less like luck and more like inevitability.

Denki, the San Francisco startup founded in 2025 by brothers Felipe Jin Li and David Jin Li, just secured $4.1M in seed funding. Base10 Partners and Shine Capital led the round with participation from Y Combinator and 20VC. Respect where it is due. Congratulations to CEO Felipe Jin Li, co founder David Jin Li, and the Denki crew for stepping into one of the most painfully manual corners of finance and deciding the machines should probably do the heavy lifting.

Denki is building an AI powered assurance platform that automates internal auditing from planning to testing to documentation. The kind of work that usually eats weeks of human time and a small forest of spreadsheets now moves through software that actually understands the process. Controls get tested. Evidence gets collected. Working papers appear with full audit traces. The system plugs directly into the tools auditors already live inside like Auditboard, Workiva, and the ERPs running underneath the whole operation.

There is a sharp idea buried in that architecture. Denki is not asking companies to rip out their current stack and pray the migration gods are in a good mood. The platform works on top of the systems already there. It collects the data, runs the walkthrough interviews, and produces the documentation auditors need when regulators start asking questions. 99% software. 1% services. The math alone tells you where this is headed.

Now zoom out. Public companies and fintechs spend hundreds of billions each year navigating compliance from SOX to BSA and AML. The demand is not going away. If anything it keeps expanding. Which means whoever makes compliance faster, traceable, and less dependent on late night manual work is sitting on a very interesting piece of real estate.

Felipe Jin Li and David Jin Li are tackling the problem with a 2-person team and a product aimed squarely at one of the largest cost centers in corporate finance. That is a bold way to enter the room. Base10 Partners, Shine Capital, Y Combinator, and 20VC clearly saw the signal early. When a system that historically runs on binders and billable hours starts running on software instead, the ripple spreads far beyond the audit department. And Denki is stepping into that current right when the tide is turning.