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0-to-1 startup journey: Designing the best AI agents for Finance & Accounting (F&A) teams

Spearheaded design-driven product-market fit assessment with 10+ Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) of an AI-native finance & accounting (F&A) automation platform, influencing a $2M seed to $6.5M Series A fund raise at Hyperbots. Scaled product & brand design, owned content marketing & SEO, leading to the successful launch of the MVP for paying customers in the US mid-market, helping them achieve ~40-50% productivity gain.

Overview

Hyperbots started up in July 2023 in Bangalore with a mission to free up humans from mundane and repetitive tasks in finance. This was a 0-1 journey to ultimately build a proprietary Agentic AI platform for Finance and Accounting, powering state-of-the-art AI-native co-pilots, designed to:

Significantly automate F&A processes
Reduce the administrative burden on finance teams and;
Enable faster, more accurate decision-making

I joined as VP of Design initially spearheading design research, product and brand design - but my role quickly expanded to include a senior leadership charter to lead content marketing and people experience in addition to design.

My journey of 2 years at Hyperbots so far in numbers:

Highlights

$2M → $6M

Designed, prototyped and tested the Invoice Processing AI agent workspace for Accounts Payable (AP) accountants to ensure product-market-fit
Completed the MVP designs for a fully functional POC
The product-market fit validation and MVP influenced investor confidence to take the company from $2M seed funding to $6M series A round

12 → 24 CFOs

Worked alongside the CEO to lead product-market fit research, ran early concept validation sessions with 12 Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) remotely in the US
Scaled the CFO engagement to 24 for a Go-to-Market (GTM) push leading to sustained ICP outreach and ultimately conversion into a sizeable number of paid customers

1 → 6 designers

Hired the 1st founding product designer, Dhruv, within the 1st month
Scaled the team to a 6 well-rounded team of designers with diverse and complimentary skills
So far managed 3 exits, 4 promotions, one design → PM lateral move

POC → 6 AI agents

Led the product design for the multi-agent AI-native platform for invoice processing, procurement, payments, sales tax verification and vendor management, covering all aspects of Finance & Accounting (F&A) process transformation leading to a straight-through processing of 80% of the invoice volume.
My team delivered detailed designs for a first-of-it’s kind workspace for AP accountants to review ~20% invoices that need human approval
Plus a conversational AI module for controllers and CFOs including data analytics dashboards

0 → 25k followers

Led content marketing efforts primarily on LinkedIn to organically acquire 25k followers
1st rank for post metrics, 4th for engagement with a zero budget and a 3-member team of interns.
The team produced 300+ pieces of content like CFO video interviews, finance and AI thought leadership articles, re-designed and SEO-optimised the website.

0 → 100 team

Responsible for the company-wide people experience charter of a steadily growing team of 100+
As an early stage start-up, we are guided by frugality and resourcefulness. Created and led PeopleX pods of employee-volunteers to manage essential people experience functions from onboarding to managing exits, drafting employee policies, ensuring SOC compliance and so on.
Successful PeopleX pod initiatives include, procuring group health cover for full-time employees, setting up and managing the popular food pantry, running weekly town halls, organising company off-sites and hackathons.

Case studies

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Can’t spill all the beans (NDA’s the word!), but imagine designing in stealth mode for AI + fintech, with impact that’s making waves. Curious? Let’s chat.