Our story

Finance operations shouldn't slow your business down.

We built OPERAFI because we watched talented founders and finance teams spend their best hours on work that machines should handle. That ends now.

2026

Founded

EU

Data centres

GDPR

Compliant

4

EU countries

How we got here

From frustration to platform.

OPERAFI was founded in 2026 by a team of finance operators and AI engineers who had spent years watching the same problem repeat itself: smart people doing dumb work.

Our founders had worked inside fast-growing SMEs across Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain. In every company, the finance function was the bottleneck — not because the people weren't good, but because the tools weren't.

Spreadsheets stitched together with manual exports. Reconciliation runs that took three days. Month-end closes that pushed into the following month. Cash flow visibility that was always two weeks stale.

We built OPERAFI to solve that problem — for every SME finance team that deserves better tools.

Mission

Automate the routine. Amplify the human.

OPERAFI exists to give every SME the same AI-powered finance capabilities that enterprise companies have had for years — without the enterprise price tag, the six-month implementation, or the army of consultants.

Radical transparency

Every AI decision is explainable. You always know why OPERAFI did what it did.

Built for trust

Finance data is the most sensitive data a business has. We treat it that way — AES-256 encrypted, built with privacy by design, and processed exclusively in EU data centres.

Continuous improvement

Our AI learns from every correction, every edge case, every business. It gets better every day.

SME-first design

We don't build for Fortune 500 and scale down. We build for the 50-person company and scale up.

The team

Finance operators and AI engineers.

We're a small, focused team of finance operators and AI engineers. Half of us come from finance; the other half from AI and engineering. That combination is deliberate.

LH

Lena Hartmann

Co-founder & CEO

Former CFO at two Series B startups. 12 years in finance operations across DACH.

MR

Marco Reyes

Co-founder & CTO

Previously led ML infrastructure at a major European fintech. PhD in machine learning.

SvdB

Sophie van den Berg

VP Product

10 years building finance software. Obsessed with making complex workflows feel simple.

JW

Jonas Weber

VP Engineering

Distributed systems engineer. Built payment infrastructure for enterprise finance applications.

AD

Amara Diallo

Head of Customer Success

Former Big 4 auditor. Bridges the gap between what customers need and what we build.

TM

Tobias Müller

Head of AI Research

Specialises in document understanding and financial NLP. 20+ published papers.

Want to work with us?

We're hiring across engineering, product, and customer success. And if you want to see OPERAFI in action, we'd love to show you.