About
Why I'm building this — and why I'm here.
Plain English. No buzzwords.
I'm Rico. I've spent the last 15 years doing the work that COSai is built to make obsolete — pulling documentation from a hundred different places, chasing the receipt for the transaction, building the audit trail by hand. Twice at scale: once as an investor running diligence on businesses where the data room never told the full story, once as an operator building financial discipline into companies that didn't have it before.
The pattern is the same every time. The bank feed tells you what moved. The general ledger tells you how it was coded. The receipts, invoices, grant award letters, contracts, and email approvals that prove every dollar are scattered across dozens of mailboxes the controller can't see — the PI's, the procurement officer's, the cardholder's, the program manager's. Every audit, every diligence engagement, every federal grant cycle is the same gathering exercise. Manual. Repeated. Expensive.
The technology to fix that exists now. Inbox-level consented access at the org level (Google Workspace DWD, M365 admin-consent), language models good enough to match a receipt to a transaction, audit-grade chain of custody as a tractable engineering problem. The reason no one has built the completeness layer yet is that the previous wave of tools (Dext, Hubdoc, AutoEntry, QBO receipt-capture) all started one step too late — they assume the document already arrived. Our wedge is the prior step. The document hasn't arrived. The controller doesn't even know which inbox holds it. We find it, identify who has it, broker the access — with the chain-of-custody record an auditor accepts.
I'm not naive about who carries this pain. I'm not the controller at a research university. I'm not the audit partner at a regional CPA firm. I'm not the senior on a forensic engagement. I'm a founder building infrastructure for those people — talking to them every week, learning what the audit cycle actually feels like from the inside, shipping what they tell me they need.
We're working with first design partners now. If your institution lives this pain, get in touch directly.
Five things I believe
- — The controller shouldn't be doing manual gathering work that software can do. Audit cycles will get harder, not easier; the team that's freed up here moves up the value stack.
- — Completeness is the substrate for every audit, every grant report, every diligence finding. Get completeness right and everything downstream gets easier.
- — We don't replace your system of record. QuickBooks, Workday, Banner, Blackbaud stay authoritative. COSai is the integrity and completeness layer that sits on top.
- — Audit-grade chain of custody is the non-negotiable. If we can't prove who saw what when, the output isn't worth shipping.
- — We're early. You're getting in early on purpose. You get direct access to me; we get the customer truth that shapes the product.