Ken Villum Klausen og to tidligere Lunar-topchefer tager Repodo ud af stealth med 8,2 millioner euro i ryggen. Selskabet er et godkendt revisionsfirma bygget op om AI, starter i Danmark og har allerede atten ansatte.
Fra venstre: Ken Villum Klausen, Anders Houmann, Joachim Strøjer Hansen og Peter Andreasen, de fire stiftere bag Repodo.
Lovpligtig revision er et tilladelsesreguleret felt, hvor en godkendt revisor til sidst skal skrive under på, at tallene stemmer. Repodo er registreret som et godkendt revisionsfirma, ikke som en softwareleverandør til branchen, og er stiftet i København af fire personer, hvoraf tre kommer fra ledelsen i Lunar. Selskabet lanceres i Danmark i 2026 med små og mellemstore virksomheder som første kundegruppe.
Klausen trådte af som administrerende direktør i Lunar 11. maj efter elleve år. Han stiftede udfordrerbanken i 2015 og forlod den som den største i Norden, med over en million privatkunder, en MiCA-tilladelse som udbyder af kryptoaktivtjenester — den første til en bank eller kryptoplatform i Skandinavien — og 350 millioner kroner hentet i januar. Søren Kyhl overtog i juni. Hans begrundelse dengang var, at det bedste tidspunkt for en stifter til at give stafetten videre er, når tingene fungerer, ikke når de ikke gør.
Den seneste uge har Kaupr fulgt Klausen på LinkedIn, mens selskabet stadig lå i skjul. Der talte han sig op til atten: fire omkring et cafébord, fjorten mere på kontoret, og et billede, han indledte med at bemærke, hvor svært det er at se naturlig ud efter måneder med den samme hemmelighed. Om det at begynde forfra skrev han, at man ikke starter et nyt selskab, fordi det første var sjovt, men fordi man støder på et problem, der er så strukturelt absurd, at man ikke kan lade være med at se det.
Problemet viste sig at være revision. Med sig fra Lunar har han Peter Andreasen og Joachim Strøjer Hansen, der var henholdsvis finansdirektør og produktdirektør i banken. Den fjerde medstifter er revisor Anders Houmann, der tager revisionsfaget med ind i teamet.
Pre-seed-runden er på 8,2 millioner euro. En pre-seed-runde er den første eksterne kapitalrejsning, et selskab foretager, normalt før indtægter af betydning er på plads. Blandt engleinvestorerne er Alex Berriche, stifter af Fleet, Oscar Höglund, medstifter af Epidemic Sound, og Philip Man, stifter af terralayr.
Kapitalen skal gå til at udvikle teknologiplatformen videre, bygge teamet og understøtte lanceringen i Danmark.
Sarra Zayani, partner i Hedosophia, siger, at det afgørende for dem var, at teamet ikke blot lægger AI oven på et eksisterende arbejdsflow.
»De bygger driftsmodellen om omkring teknologien, samtidig med at de bevarer det professionsansvar, revision kræver«, siger hun.
Platformen automatiserer dele af revisionsprocessen: indsamling af data, afstemninger, dokumentation og transaktionsanalyse. Godkendte revisorer beholder ansvaret for gennemgang, risikovurdering, faglig vurdering og den endelige underskrift.
Klausen beskriver dagens revision som en driftsmodel, der hviler tungt på manuelt arbejde, og som AI gør det muligt at bygge om fra bunden — ikke ved at fjerne revisorer, men ved at lade teknologien tage mere af den repetitive behandling. På LinkedIn er han skarpere i formen. Der beskriver han branchens metoder som fyrre år gamle, og forretningsmodellen som »en model, der fakturerer for timer i stedet for at komme hurtigere frem til sandheden«.
Skellet, han selv lægger vægt på, er, hvilke brancher der tager teknologien i brug, og hvilke der bliver bygget om af den.
»Nogle brancher kommer til at tage AI i brug. Nogle få kommer til at blive bygget om af den, fra bunden«, skrev han, mens selskabet stadig var hemmeligt.
At udfordre en etableret aktør krævede før hundredvis af mennesker, er hans argument. Nu kræver det en håndfuld meget dygtige, og maskinerne, der matcher dem. Tre af de atten er præsenteret, alle med titlen Member of Technical Staff: Thomas Bøgh Fangel, der arbejdede med Klausen i næsten ti år i Lunar, Nicolai Kobber, omkring otte år ved hans side, og Alexander Kledal, tæt på syv år, der tog til Uber og nu er tilbage.
Selskabet henviser til, at det europæiske revisionsmarked er værd over 80 milliarder euro om året, og at lovpligtig revision fortsat er dyr og administrativt krævende for mange små og mellemstore virksomheder. Målet er at skære det manuelle arbejde ned på begge sider af bordet, både hos revisor og hos kunden.
Repodo er ifølge selskabet indrettet til at udvide marked for marked i Europa. Norden har bygget kategoridefinerende selskaber før, skriver Klausen, men ambitionen denne gang var aldrig regional — snarere tværtimod.
Torsdag står han på scenen under Future of Fintech på TechBBQ i København, i en samtale med titlen »Starting Again: Building from Zero After Lunar«. Den titel blev sat, mens selskabet endnu ikke fandtes offentligt.
Kilder: Repodo, LinkedIn, Kaupr
Få ubegrænset adgang til nyhedsartikler og et nordisk community via Kaupr Member (gratis medlemskab)
Title (63 characters): Ex-Lunar executives out of stealth with €8.2M for AI audit firm
Intro Long 250 (204 characters): Ken Villum Klausen and two former Lunar executives take Repodo out of stealth with €8.2 million behind them. The authorised audit firm is built around AI, starts in Denmark and already has eighteen staff.
Intro Medium 150 (130 characters): Ken Villum Klausen and two former Lunar executives out of stealth with Repodo, an audit firm built around AI. €8.2 million raised.
From left: Ken Villum Klausen, Peter Andreasen, Joachim Strøjer Hansen and Anders Houmann, the four founders behind Repodo.
Statutory audit is a licensed field in which an authorised auditor must ultimately sign off that the numbers hold. Repodo is registered as an authorised audit firm rather than as a software supplier to the profession, and was founded in Copenhagen by four people, three of them from Lunar's management. The company launches in Denmark in 2026 with small and medium-sized businesses as its first customer group.
Klausen stepped down as chief executive of Lunar on 11 May, after eleven years. He founded the challenger bank in 2015 and left it as the largest in the Nordics, with more than a million private customers, a MiCA licence as a crypto-asset service provider — the first for any bank or crypto platform in Scandinavia — and DKK 350 million raised in January. Søren Kyhl took over in June. His reasoning at the time was that the best moment for a founder to hand over the baton is when things are working, not when they are not.
Kaupr has spent the past week following Klausen on LinkedIn, while the company was still in stealth. There he counted his way up to eighteen: four around a café table, fourteen more at the office, and a photograph he introduced by noting how hard it is to look natural after months of sitting on the same secret. On starting over, he wrote that you do not launch another company because the first one was fun, but because you run into a problem so structurally absurd that you cannot unsee it.
The problem turned out to be audit. Joining him from Lunar are Peter Andreasen and Joachim Strøjer Hansen, the bank's chief financial officer and chief product officer respectively. The fourth co-founder is auditor Anders Houmann, who brings the audit profession into the team.
The pre-seed round totals €8.2 million. A pre-seed round is the first external capital a company raises, normally before meaningful revenue is in place. The angel investors include Alex Berriche, founder of Fleet, Oscar Höglund, co-founder of Epidemic Sound, and Philip Man, founder of terralayr.
The capital will go towards developing the technology platform further, building the team and supporting the launch in Denmark.
Sarra Zayani, partner at Hedosophia, says what mattered to them was that the team is not simply layering AI onto an existing workflow.
"They are rebuilding the operating model around the technology while preserving the professional accountability that audit requires," she says.
The platform automates parts of the audit process: data collection, reconciliations, documentation and transaction analysis. Authorised auditors retain responsibility for review, risk assessment, professional judgement and final sign-off.
Klausen describes today's audit as an operating model that leans heavily on manual work, and one that AI makes it possible to redesign from the ground up — not by removing auditors, but by letting technology absorb more of the repetitive processing. On LinkedIn he is sharper. There he calls the industry's methods forty years old, and the business model "a model that bills for hours instead of getting to the truth faster".
The distinction he himself draws is between industries that adopt the technology and industries that are rebuilt by it.
"Some industries will adopt AI. A few will be rebuilt by it, from scratch," he wrote while the company was still secret.
Taking on an incumbent used to require hundreds of people, runs his argument. Now it takes a handful of very good ones and the machines to match. Three of the eighteen have been introduced, all as Member of Technical Staff: Thomas Bøgh Fangel, who worked with Klausen for close to ten years at Lunar, Nicolai Kobber, around eight years alongside him, and Alexander Kledal, close to seven years, who left for Uber and has now come back.
The company points to a European audit market worth more than €80 billion a year, and to statutory audit remaining costly and administratively demanding for many small and medium-sized businesses. The aim is to cut the manual work on both sides of the table, at the auditor and at the client.
Repodo has been set up to expand market by market across Europe, according to the company. The Nordics have built category-defining companies before, Klausen writes, but the ambition this time was never regional — if anything, the opposite.
On Thursday he takes the stage at Future of Fintech at TechBBQ in Copenhagen, in a fireside chat titled "Starting Again: Building from Zero After Lunar". That title was set while the company did not yet publicly exist.
Sources: Repodo, LinkedIn, Kaupr
Du har læst det, du kan læse gratis. Med en konto får du ubegrænset adgang til alle nyheder og artikler på kaupr.io — og bliver en del af netværket af investorer, professionelle og builders, der følger onchain finance.