By Yann Ravel-Sibillot, co-founder and CEO of Flowie
When my co-founder and I started building Flowie, we were obsessed with a single question. Why do finance teams still feel so trapped? The technology around them had evolved dramatically, but their day-to-day reality hadn’t. They were still stitching together a dozen disconnected tools, manually chasing approvals, reconciling data across systems that were never designed to talk to each other. All this while operating under the constant pressure of having to get the compliance piece right.
That last part is what kept us up at night. Because compliance isn’t just a checkbox. For a multinational business, the rules governing every invoice, every payment, every supplier relationship are different depending on the country, the transaction type, and the moment in time. Complicating things are that these rules keep changing. Getting it wrong doesn’t just create operational pain; it creates a layer of regulatory exposure that can halt a business in its tracks entirely.
What We Built and Why It’s Different
Flowie is an AI-native agentic platform built from the ground up to automate the full scope of finance and procurement operations, including accounts payable, procure-to-pay, invoicing, collections, supplier onboarding, contracts, and more. Our agents don’t just accelerate existing workflows, they run them end-to-end, across virtually any ERP, replacing the sprawl of point solutions that most finance organizations have accumulated over decades.
But here is the honest truth about what we ran into. You can automate every step of a finance process brilliantly and still fail at the moment it crosses a border. VAT rules in Spain work differently than in Germany. E-invoicing mandates in Brazil are completely unlike those in France. Real-time reporting requirements in Italy don’t look anything like that’s required in the U.S. Automating finance without deeply embedding compliance into each of those steps isn’t just incomplete, it’s a liability.
We knew from the beginning that solving this problem properly would require regulatory intelligence at a scale we couldn’t build alone. That’s what led us to Sovos.
Why This Combination Makes Sense
Sovos has spent years building something extraordinary. A global compliance intelligence layer that tracks the regulatory rules, schemas, and filing deadlines for every jurisdiction in which an enterprise operates. They call it the Sovos Compliance Graph. When I first saw it, I understood immediately that this was the missing piece we had been working around.
What Flowie and Sovos create together isn’t an integration. It’s a fundamentally new category for tax compliance. When our agentic platform executes a procure-to-pay process in Europe, it will do so with real-time awareness of VAT obligations, e-invoicing mandates, supplier compliance status, and cross-border tax optimization automatically.
For our customers, the value is immediate and tangible. Finance teams no longer have to choose between speed and compliance. Processes that used to require manual review and compliance sign-off can now run autonomously, with full auditability.
A Founder’s Perspective on What Comes Next
Joining Sovos isn’t the end of what we set out to build. It’s the acceleration of it. The problems we started working on, fragmented finance systems, manual compliance overhead, the impossibility of operating globally without a dedicated army of tax and regulatory experts, are now solvable at a scale that wasn’t within reach for us as a standalone company.
Governments around the world are moving fast on real-time reporting, continuous transaction controls, and mandatory e-invoicing. The compliance burden on multinational businesses is only going to increase. Enterprises that build on a platform where compliance is a native capability and not a bolt-on, will have a structural advantage over those that don’t.
We built Flowie to solve one of the hardest problems in enterprise software. Now, together with Sovos, we get to finish the job. I couldn’t be more energized about what comes next.