Ken Villum Klausen spent eleven years convincing Scandinavians they didn’t need a bank branch. He stepped down as Lunar’s chief executive in June, handed the keys to former Saxo Bank boss Søren Kyhl, and by 21 August had already registered a new company with the Danish Business Authority. Its name is Repodo. Its target, in Klausen’s words, is “the last major professional service the modern world forgot to rebuild.”
That service is audit. And the pitch is uncomfortable in a way its founders probably haven’t fully reckoned with yet.
Repodo launched this week with Klausen, Lunar co-founder Peter Andreasen and former Lunar product chief Joachim Strøjer Hansen. The company raised €8.2 million in what Klausen calls one of the largest pre-seed rounds in Nordic history, from Hedosophia and Seed Capital, the same two firms that backed Lunar at the start. The founding auditor is Anders Houmann, who spent years at EY and Deloitte before deciding the profession he trained in needed replacing. Angel money came in too, including Epidemic Sound co-founder Oscar Höglund and Fleet founder Alex Berriche, the kind of names that follow a founder rather than a thesis.
The product is agentic AI that handles data collection, reconciliation, documentation and transaction analysis: the grinding, billable-hour work that fills the months between year-end close and signed opinion. What it doesn’t do, Repodo is careful to say, is make the final call. That’s still left to a human.
Here’s the problem with that reassurance: it’s exactly the part of the job Repodo’s own pitch says has already become mechanical.
Audit exists because someone has to be accountable when a number turns out to be wrong. Not a model, not a vendor. A licensed person whose name sits on the opinion and whose career is on the line. That’s the reason the profession survived decades of technology that automated everything around it, from spreadsheets to OCR to RPA bots chewing through invoices. Judgment stayed human because liability had to stay human.
Repodo’s bet is that the judgment itself can now be automated too, right up to the point where a regulator still insists somebody sign. If reconciliation, documentation and analysis are already machine work, and Houmann’s team is confident enough in that machine to build a company on it, the human sign-off starts looking less like a safeguard and more like a formality kept in place because nobody has yet been forced to remove it.
That’s not a knock on Repodo. It’s the logical endpoint of what they’re selling, and probably why Klausen picked audit in the first place. Unlike lending or payments, audit’s economics are almost entirely labour: junior staff doing detailed, repetitive verification billed at senior rates. Automate that convincingly enough, at a firm with real credibility behind it, and the profession’s cost structure collapses whether or not the sign-off does. The Big Four have spent a decade branding their own automation efforts as efficiency gains for clients. Repodo is the first serious attempt to sell the same automation as a reason to leave the Big Four altogether.
Lunar itself is the case study for what happens next. It counts over a million users and 40,000 business clients across the Nordics today, built on convincing an entire region that a licence and an app were enough, no branch required. Klausen, Andreasen and Strøjer Hansen are making the same wager on audit: that the credential everyone assumed was essential was actually just the interface, and the real work can be rebuilt underneath it.
Denmark is Repodo’s first market. Its own website says Europe is next. If the pitch holds, the interesting fight in a few years won’t be whether AI can do an audit. It will be whether anyone still needs to pay a person to say it did.
