Tellen Introduces a Purpose-Built AI Agentic Platform to Support Audit Teams

The era of 100% manual audit is over. Tellen, a purpose-built AI agentic platform for accounting firms, announced the availability of its AI-native platform to support audit teams at scale.

Traditionally, auditing has been a labor-intensive domain focused on verifying financial statements, assessing risk, and providing assurance on financial reporting. AI introduces the ability to scale analysis, improve accuracy, and operate across far greater volumes of data.

Tellen was built for this phase of transformation. It provides accounting firms with an AI agent workforce platform that pulls audit data from existing systems and deploys AI agents into audit teams, enabling them to comprehend and reason as members of the team. These agents assist audit professionals directly inside live workflows, supporting execution while remaining subject to firm governance, review, and control.

From Experimentation to Production

Accounting firms, increasingly backed by private equity, are moving from experimentation to production as they invest in AI to transform audit delivery.

Over the past year, Tellen has worked with fourteen major accounting firms that are evaluating the role of AI within their audit workflows and preparing for production deployment. This group includes two firms ranked in the top ten globally and six firms in the top forty, reflecting early adoption by some of the largest and most complex audit organizations in the market.

These firms are moving beyond tool-level experimentation to live deployment across substantive testing and audit quality use cases. Their focus is on how AI agents can reliably comprehend audit data, reason through engagements, and operate within real audit teams under firm governance and regulatory constraints.

Tellen’s platform shows meaningful savings, including up to 70% time savings in substantive testing and financial statement preparation, and up to 25% savings in audit quality scans. Given the seniority of audit quality work, these efficiency gains have a material economic effect.

An Operating Layer for an AI Agent Workforce

At the platform level, Tellen serves as the operating layer for an AI agent workforce within accounting firms.

The system continuously ingests and structures audit documentation as it evolves, maintaining a shared audit context across documents, workflows, and audit phases. This persistent context enables AI agents to reason with full engagement awareness, rather than relying on static files or isolated datasets.

On top of this foundation, Tellen orchestrates specialized AI agents as a coordinated workforce. Tasks, dependencies, and human review points are managed explicitly, enabling firms to deploy workflows such as audit quality and substantive testing with consistency and control.

This architecture allows firms to begin with targeted use cases and expand adoption over time, without retooling their audit stack or retraining teams as new capabilities are introduced. Tellen workforce agents will be deployed across substantive testing, audit quality, and financial statement preparation, operating as digital teammates within live audit engagements.

In parallel, Tellen is launching a new workflow agent builder that enables firms to create and customize AI agents aligned with their specific audit workflows. This allows firms to extend the platform beyond predefined use cases and embed AI agents directly into their own methodologies.

Turning Audit Data Into Digital Teammates

Traditional audit platforms focus on data storage, documentation management, and serving as systems of record. Tellen operates at an entirely different layer.

Tellen integrates seamlessly with a firm’s existing audit software and core systems, continuously ingesting engagement data and transforming it into AI agents that understand context, reason across documents, and work alongside audit teams in real time. Rather than automating isolated tasks behind the scenes, these agents act as digital teammates—actively participating in audit execution.

AI doesn’t replace auditors; they will still need to verify results and ensure the integrity and transparency of the process. This distinction is central to Tellen’s approach. The platform does not replace engagement software or professional judgment. It builds on top of existing systems, using the data they already contain to deliver agents that can reason within real audit contexts and assist teams where work actually happens.

In doing so, Tellen helps firms expand execution capacity and improve audit quality without expanding payroll.

Financing update

Backed by $2.5M in pre-seed funding from Blumberg Capital and Array Ventures, Tellen is now moving customers from experimentation to full production for the 2026 busy season.

“Tellen is building the industry's first autonomous agentic AI platform that can support execution across the audit process with audit partners in the loop for assurance” said Pramod Gosavi of Blumberg Capital. “Rather than layering AI onto existing tools, the team is focused on redefining how audit work is executed, with governance and quality at the core.”

According to Deepak Lalit, CEO of Tellen, the focus has always been on augmentation rather than replacement. “Tellen pulls data from the systems firms already use and turns it into AI agents that can comprehend and reason as members of the audit team,” Lalit said. “That is how we help firms scale execution while strengthening quality and trust.”

As accounting firms continue to invest in AI as part of broader business transformation, Tellen is entering its next phase, focused on scaling adoption and expanding engagement with strategic partners and investors aligned with its long-term vision for audit transformation.