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.
From left: Ken Villum Klausen, Anders Houmann, Joachim Strøjer Hansen and Peter Andreasen, 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
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