We spent years reading folios at month-end and writing awkward emails to top sellers. Phyto Nex AI is the auditor we wished we had.
Folio 88214, The Lakeshore Grand, Chicago
Expense report ER-2291, Regional Sales
One summary line, one receipt thumbnail, one click. The itemized folio sat in the attachment, unopened.
Report total
$984.73
Out of policy
Not visible
In early 2025, Priya Raghavan was closing the books as corporate controller at a 2,400-person software company. Her AP team of four was reviewing about 3,100 expense reports a month by hand. One afternoon she opened the folio behind a hotel report that a regional manager had approved in 22 seconds. Inside the $984 total were a $38.50 minibar charge, a $145 spa visit and a room service dinner well over the cap.
None of it was fraud in the dramatic sense. It was the ordinary leakage that lives inside line items no one reads. Fixing it meant an AP specialist writing a careful message to a top seller, who forwarded it to his VP, who called Priya. That was the job: find the problem after approval, then absorb the friction for raising it.
She called Karthik Venkataraman, who had led receipt scanning engineering at Zoho Expense, and Rohan Malhotra, who had built finance operations products at Freshworks. On 27 November 2025 the three registered Phyto Nex LLP, with its registered office in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu.
Our thesis is simple. The audit should happen on the line item, before money moves, and the uncomfortable message should be drafted by software, grounded in the handbook and approved by a human. AP stops being the bad cop. Employees fix their own mistakes. Controllers get a defensible Accountable Plan.
The structural inefficiency
Employee
Stage 1
Submits a report with one summary total per receipt.
Line items hiddenManager
Stage 2
Approves without opening the attachment. Over 80% of managers spend under 30 seconds per report.
Rubber stampAP
Stage 3
Finds the minibar after approval and has to ask for money back from someone senior.
Bad copController
Stage 4
Carries the rework: GBTA puts it at $52 and 18 minutes per report with errors, and 19% of reports have them.
Hidden costSources: GBTA Foundation expense management studies; industry operational surveys of front-line managers.
2025
Founded in Coimbatore
2.6M
Receipts audited line by line
99.4%
Field-level OCR accuracy
94%
Employees self-correct flags
41
People across Coimbatore and remote India
Operating principles
They decide product trade-offs, security reviews and how every pushback message sounds.
Phyto Nex AI flags and drafts. Your AP team approves every outgoing message and every deduction. Software never denies a reimbursement or touches a card on its own.
Every message quotes the handbook section that applies, so the conversation is about policy 6.1, not about who in finance noticed.
Connectors request the narrowest scopes each vendor offers. We read reports, receipts and transactions. We do not move money.
Customer receipts, employee names and financial data are never used to train foundation models, ours or anyone else's. LLM calls run under zero-retention terms.
A noisy auditor gets ignored. We tune for flags a controller would defend in front of the CFO, and we measure false positives per 1,000 receipts every week.
Each finding shows the receipt line, the rule, the threshold and the math. If we cannot explain it in one sentence, it does not ship as a flag.
Finance operators and enterprise engineers who have run month-end close, shipped expense software and passed security audits.
Co-founder & CEO
Spent nine years building finance operations products at Freshworks, where he watched AP teams at customer after customer export Concur reports into spreadsheets just to read the receipts. Started Phyto Nex AI to give those teams software that reads the folio for them.
Co-founder & COO
Ran month-end close as a corporate controller and owned the T&E audit queue herself for three years. She has personally written the awkward email about a $212 minibar charge to a top seller, and wrote the first 40 Phyto Nex AI rules from her own audit checklists.
Co-founder & CTO
Led the receipt scanning and approvals engineering team at Zoho Expense and earlier built payment reconciliation systems at Infosys. Architected Phyto Nex AI's read-only connector platform and line-item vision pipeline.
Chief Information Security Officer
Fourteen years securing financial data for banks and insurers at Wipro, then led SOC 2 and ISO 27001 readiness engagements at KPMG. Runs Phyto Nex AI's security program, PAN masking controls and data residency architecture.
Head of Product
Designed approval workflows used by thousands of support and finance teams. At Phyto Nex AI she owns the AP review workbench and the tone of every pushback message the agent drafts.
VP Customer
Led finance transformation programs for US mid-market clients at Deloitte after six years implementing ERP and expense systems at Tata Consultancy Services. Owns implementation, support and customer success across India and the US.
Specialists who review our rules where a wrong flag carries tax, contract or people consequences.
Advisor, finance leadership
Former CFO of a 6,000-person IT services company listed on NSE and NYSE. Took a services company through two acquisitions and a US listing. Advises on CFO buying committees, audit readiness and pricing for finance software.
CFO perspective, board reporting
Advisor, US tax
Former partner in a Big Four IRS practice and controversy group. Spent 19 years representing employers in IRS examinations, including Accountable Plan and fringe benefit audits under IRC § 62 and § 274. Reviews every tax classification rule before it ships.
IRC § 62, § 274, TCJA rules
Advisor, government contracts
22 years as a DCAA auditor and govcon compliance consultant. Audited contractor travel and incurred cost submissions for over two decades. Shapes the FAR 31.205-46 module and how unallowable costs are segregated for DCAA review.
FAR 31.205-46, DCAA audits
Advisor, people operations
Former VP People Operations at a 3,500-person global software company. Built people operations across India, the US and Europe. Helps Phyto Nex AI keep enforcement consistent and messages fair, so policy never reads as personal.
Employee experience, fair enforcement
From incorporation to 2.6 million receipts audited, with security attestations earned along the way.
2025
Feb 2025
Former controllers and enterprise engineers start building a line-item expense auditor with a founding team of seven.
Company
May 2025
Read-only connectors go live with four design partners. First line-item audit of a hotel folio in production.
Product
Jul 2025
Drafted, clause-cited messages approved by AP before sending. Early employee self-correction rate hits 87.3%.
Product
Sep 2025
Independent auditor attests to the design of security, availability and confidentiality controls.
Trust
Nov 2025
Registered with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs under the Limited Liability Partnership Act, 2008 (LLPIN ACT-0311), with its registered office in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu.
Company
Nov 2025
Three more expense platforms plus NetSuite write-back for approved deductions and tax categories.
Product
2026
Jan 2026
Microsoft Teams joins Slack and email. Self-correction rate across customers reaches 94%.
Product
Mar 2026
Six-month observation window closes with zero exceptions across 117 tested controls.
Trust
May 2026
The millionth receipt is read line by line. Customers recover $2.84M in out-of-policy and duplicate spend to date.
Company
Jun 2026
Information security management system certified across product engineering and customer operations.
Trust
Aug 2026
Customers can pin receipt images and audit data to AWS Mumbai (ap-south-1) alongside US East.
Trust
Sep 2026
First annual report pairing GBTA and ACFE figures with anonymized audit patterns from 2.6M receipts.
Research
Who you are contracting with, where we are and how to reach the right team.
Offices
Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu (registered office)
Remote across India and the US East coast
Connect Phyto Nex AI to your expense tool in 15 minutes and see what slipped past managers this month.
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