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

"Right after we graduated EF, we started building the earliest layer of accounts receivable automation, which was collections automation. These are different modules within the same AR stack that help companies send invoices faster, collect on those invoices quickly, give clients professional branded portals to make payments, check invoice status, extract statements of accounts, and apply payments to incoming transactions. We built that first, and by 2022, the entire stack was in place." - Saurabh Chauhan, Co-founder and CEO of Peakflo

"We have been doing a proof of concept with a lot of our AR clients on a voice AI agent that can be embedded in the existing workflow. It coexists with automatic email reminders, SMSes, or WhatsApps, and somewhere in the workflow, you can insert a voice AI agent to make a call, for example, seven days past the due date depending on your preference. Just like a collection officer, it has full context about the client it's calling—it knows the outstanding invoices, the total amount due, the original due date, any open disputes, and even prior conversations like a promise to pay in two weeks. It tracks whether that's an upcoming or broken promise to pay." - Saurabh Chauhan, Co-founder and CEO of Peakflo

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.