Akshaya Srivatsa, Maxima CPO on Agentic AI and the Future of Accounting

Grace Gong (0:00)

But, oh, we're live. Hi, Akshaya, welcome to Venture with Grace.

Akshaya Srivatsa (0:05)

Hey, thank you, thanks for having me.

Grace Gong (0:07)

I'm so excited about our conversation, since, you know, like, actually, last week, I just saw Yogi, but like, it was, I feel like the conversation was so fun, and I felt like, you know, it's super interesting to hear, like, different perspective from, like, a company co-founding team, and like, people probably have, like, different things that they really emphasize on, so like, I'm like, super excited for our thing and I feel like building an AI product as well as like, especially in the future of accounting space. Okay, so before we dive in, I want to give a quick shout out to our amazing sponsor. This episode is brought to you by Nebius, the ultimate cloud for AI novices. Nebius provides AI infrastructure you can count on, combining reliability and speed with flexibility and engineering support unmatched by hyperscalers. AI leaders like Meta, Shopify and Higgsfield already partnered with Nebius to run their AI workloads. Plus, Venture back startup can save up to 150K on compute costs when they apply for access. Visit nebius.com or nebius.com/startup to learn more.

I want to start with your journey because I feel like, oh my God, I'm so sorry. I'm like, it's been a tech week.

Actually, you have been a software engineer in your whole career and then you were leader at Hode and you were VP of engineering and engineering leader at WhatsApp before you co-founded Maxima. I want to start with since I was listening to some past podcasts about Maxima. Obviously, Yogi spent maybe even one year or two year into finding co-founding teams. And obviously, I feel like you guys are doing great things in the accounting space.

I want to start with what would you say is the journey for you in terms of finding the co-founding team? I feel like the thing about building the AI product, and especially in the accounting space, the differentiation is it takes a lot of, you can't make any errors, especially you have to make sure everything is secure, and then the legacy system can actually adopt this problem. Coming from Bolt and WhatsApp, those are two different products that's custom-pacing, and so maybe we can start from how do you think about why there's funding co-founder level to building the product level, how did it all start?

Akshaya Srivatsa (2:42)

Yeah, awesome. So I think, for me, my career has taken a lot of different paths. I was actually very early at Twitter, built that ads infrastructure, and then I moved to Bolt where I did a lot of their payment systems, had to build a lot of the core founding ledgers and exchange rates, managing all of that, moving a lot of volume through, and then I did spam at WhatsApp. And the thing I like about just generally my way of approaching my career is I like to solve complex problems.

I'm not intimidated by something that's new for me and something that I have no exposure in. I always think of every problem as something that can be learned. I can take learning from my past experiences and apply that. So to me, accounting was exactly that. When we first started exploring, we used to talk to a lot of people in the finance and accounting space. One of my co-founders, Jack, his wife is actually a senior accounting manager at one of the big fours.

So we've known a lot of friends in the accounting circle. We've heard of the stories of how accounting works. And so to me, when we started hearing more and more of this problem of data and reconciliations and challenges, it kind of became very interesting to me. And I started digging in really deep. And how we all came together is, you know, I think for a company to be successful, you need the right kind of founding team to come together.

You need the right kind of domain expertise for each of us to have. So me and Jack bring in a lot of the technology to the product, technology to the industry, and understanding from all of our past experiences. Yogi brings in the subject matter expertise and having lived through that journey. Like he was there at a drew break all the way from 10 million ARR all the way through IPO, and they had bought all the software possible, all the headcount possible, and it just couldn't solve the problem. So to me, the right founding team was important, and I think we have that. The other thing I really appreciate about us as a company and the culture is we move really fast. I remember meeting Yogi on his 40th birthday, and it's a special day for a lot of people, and he spent so much of his time in the morning with me and not with his family, and that speaks volumes about his ability to hustle hard and get things done. That really stood out, and after that, you could see day in and day out, we would be working incredibly hard, talking to so many customers.