Numra co-founder David Kearney, FCA, sees a world of potential in the advent of AI for accountants who can now expect to see their work move up the value chain

David Kearney vividly recalls the release of the first version of ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, by US tech firm OpenAI in November 2022.

A Chartered Accountant, entrepreneur and self-confessed “techie,” Kearney had sold Peblo, his first start-up, just months earlier and was on the look-out for ideas for a new venture with global potential.

“That first ChatGPT release was really the first time I’d come across the concept and capabilities of generative AI (GenAI) and large language models (LLMs),” Kearney says.

“It was all I could think about at the time. I remember spending a full week of evenings staying up late just playing with ChatGPT, getting to know it, reading all about GenAI and LLMs and learning about how it all works. I was fascinated.”

Almost immediately, based on his own experience as a Chartered Accountant, Kearney could see a potential commercial application for the technology in the professional field he was most familiar with.

“There are literally dozens of use cases out there for GenAI. The one I zeroed in on was accountancy,” he explains. 

Kearney established Numra in August 2023 and, alongside his co-founder Conor Digan, began to develop an AI-powered automation platform for finance teams. 

Numra closed a €1.5 million seed funding round in December led by Elkstone Partners, the early-stage venture capital firm, and released the first version of “Mary,” its AI assistant for finance teams.

Numra’s AI platform is aimed primarily at mid-sized companies with in-house finance teams processing high-volume transactions.

“One of the biggest things Mary can help these teams with is workflow automation. She excels at repetitive tasks, such as invoice processing, three-way matching, payments and reconciliations,” Kearney explains.

“If we take accounts payable as an example, Mary can identify an invoice from an email, extract the required invoice data and enter it into the accounting system. She can then send the invoice to whomever needs to approve it and, from there, she can execute the payment.”

Kearney says Mary has been designed to behave like a “real-life team member.” She can be trained up on existing company processes and can interact with communication platforms already in use, such as email, Microsoft Teams and Slack. 

“You onboard Mary, just like a normal team member. You train her on your internal processes, you give her access to your systems and then get her to start helping you with your workload,” he says.

“She can manage complex tasks like answering vendor queries and performing detailed cost allocations, improving over time through user feedback.

“That’s really the beauty of GenAI. It has this capability to ingest and process vast amounts of unstructured data and take on tasks that were previously too complex to automate.”

The result, Kearney says, is that the role of the Chartered Accountant will be elevated with a new focus on higher-value activities that require strategic thinking and creativity.
“There has been quite a lot of fear mongering around how AI is going to impact jobs in the future, including jobs in the accounting profession,” he says.

“That’s kind of understandable, but AI actually represents more of an opportunity than a risk for accountants and other professions. I think it should be embraced.”

Kearney began his own career as a Chartered Accountant as an undergraduate studying commerce at UCD. He undertook a one-year placement with PwC and went on to train in the firm’s audit department.

“The Chartered Accountant qualification had been on my radar for a long time and I specialised in accounting in my final year at college to get the CAP1 exemption,” he explains.

“I always had a very strong interest in business and entrepreneurship and I felt that the Chartered Accountant qualification would be a really good launchpad for my career. It’s very dynamic and it gives you a lot of career options.”

 After qualifying, Kearney moved to southeastern Australia in 2018 where he spent three-and-a-half years in Melbourne working for large-scale organisations like PZ Cussons, RACV and National Australia Bank. 

“I worked in finance departments, mainly in financial planning and analysis. I had an amazing time and built up some great experience in commercial roles, but it was always in the back of my mind that I wanted to do something for myself,” he says.

After returning to Ireland with his partner Grace in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kearney hit upon the idea for Peblo, his first venture. 

Peblo was a financing platform for content creators and influencers. Kearney established the start-up in late 2020 with co-founder Jake Browne and sold Peblo less than two years later to Wayflyer, the Irish-owned e-commerce funding platform.

“Peblo was a bit of a crazy idea. It was an invoice factoring company for influencers and their talent agencies. 

We were basically buying sponsorship invoices from influencers, so they could get paid sooner for sponsored work for brands. It took off. It grew legs really quickly and we sold in early 2022.”

Peblo’s rapid growth and early acquisition was like “lightning in a bottle,” Kearney says now. “It’s rare enough that a start-up would scale that quickly and attract interest from a buyer,” he says. “It was good timing, a good value proposition. Sometimes things just work out.”

Peblo may have taken off at lightning speed, but Kearney’s interest in technology goes right back to childhood.

“One of my earliest memories is of my grandad’s Apple Macintosh computer. That was back in the early nineties. I was glued to the thing every time we visited and he ended up gifting it to me before I had even started primary school. 

“I must have been about four and I still remember the excitement. Since then, I’ve been a bit of an early adopter of new technology. I love trying new things. Technology has always been a big part of my life.”

Now, with Numra’s seed funding round secured, Kearney has ambitious plans for the fledgling venture.

“We’ll use the funding to accelerate customer acquisition in the US and to invest further in product development,” he says.

“Our main target market will be the finance teams in mid-sized organisations. These teams often have too much work and too few heads. They are the most likely to recognise, and benefit from, this kind of AI-enabled workflow automation from the get-go.”

For Chartered Accountants fearful that the advent of such automated financial platforms could upend the profession, Kearney says the critical role the profession plays across all sectors will not be replaced. Rather, it will evolve.

“The data entry, the document processing and the ‘number-crunching’ is going to go away. AI can do all of that better than we can,” he says.

“AI is very good at doing a lot of the time-consuming work people don’t tend to enjoy and that is a positive for Chartered Accountants who can instead start to focus on more valuable strategic work.

“Ultimately, I think we can expect to see the day-to-day work of Chartered Accountants move away from ‘the doing’ and more towards orchestrating and reviewing.”