Saurabh Chauhan: From EF to YC, Beating the Hype & Building AI Finance Agents – E603

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Saurabh Chauhan, Co-founder and CEO of Peakflo, returns to BRAVE with Jeremy Au to reflect on their journey since first meeting at Entrepreneur First in 2020. They unpack how Saurabh identified pain points in finance ops during his time with Rocket Internet, how he structured his co-founder search, and how early customer interviews shaped Peakflo’s product roadmap. They explore why he rejected the social commerce hype, how Y Combinator reset his scale ambitions, and how Google’s AI Accelerator helped move Peakflo from traditional SaaS to agentic workflows. They also discuss startup fraud detection and how external stakeholders can cut through opacity.

02:40: Why Saurabh joined EF: He had identified cash flow and supplier payment issues in past startups and wanted to solve this. EF was attractive for its high technical founder density, which led to matching with Dmitry, a PhD in AI and former CDO at AirAsia.

10:02: Rejected social commerce despite hype: Saurabh entered EF with two ideas—cutting customer acquisition costs and finance automation. Interviews with 30 to 40 operators in social commerce showed no real CAC compression and surfaced product quality and platform leakage issues.

23:47: Peakflo started with accounts receivable automation: They built modules like collections, dispute management, customer portals, and payment reconciliation. It took over a year to fully build the AR stack from late 2020 to 2022.

25:40: Accounts payable followed based on demand: Customers didn’t want to use two systems. Peakflo added AP features like invoice capture, PO matching, and supplier payments, which took another year and launched by late 2023.

28:30: Google AI Accelerator pushed the move toward agentic workflows: Peakflo now builds AI agents to perform human tasks like logging into client portals, submitting invoices, and reconciling ERP systems.

30:26: Voice AI agents now handle collection calls: The agent knows invoice details, dispute history, and broken promises to pay. It engages clients like a collection officer, takes notes, and feeds updates into follow-up workflows.

36:32: Agentic workflows are the future of finance ops: Saurabh sees Peakflo evolving into a workflow engine powered by AI agents across back-office functions like lead qualification, collections, and month-end closing.

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