Aipeiron

Inspiration

Back when I was a freshman, I started working at Rangeview, an aerospace manufacturing startup. There I handled operations, which included accounting. I had absolutely no clue how to do taxes or accounting so I decided to hire an accounting firm. But the process was all very confusing to me. They would ask me for financial documents, or ask to do historical bookkeeping for our LLC, but no matter how many people I asked, I never had a solid grasp of what accounting was. So I decided to drop all of my classes and sign up for some accounting ones. A month into those classes, I realized what the accounting firms were doing was easy, and that I shouldn't be paying them so much money to do a task I could easily do myself, so I fired them and took up the task of being rangeviews sole accountant.

Accounting today is broken. Companies with less than 100k in their bank account are expected to pay thousands of dollars a month for an accounting firm, and that’s not to mention the thousands more that they’ll charge you once you register to do your taxes or other special tasks. This is because accounting is a foreign word to most founders. Many of them don’t even know if accounting is legally required, let alone the processes that go behind the scenes of the accounting firm they hired. And thus, accounting firms can get away with low effort and sub-par results. Something has to change.

What it does

Aipeiron to automates accounting, financial modeling, and compliance with the power of AI. With Aipeiron, any company will be able to get the insights that an accounting firm could provide 100x faster and 50x cheaper just as effectively. And the founder has full control and ownership every step of the way. Doing so is simple: by connecting your bank account, transactions flow automatically from your bank into our finetuned GPT-4 model, which then outputs categorized transactions, exactly what an accountant would do. From that data, you can generate financial models and budgets, or chat with our chatbot trained on the IRS’s instructions to talk about how you would file taxes, because taxes are confusing.

How we built it

We used NextJS14. The account creation step was done with NextAuth and Google OAuth. The Bank connection and free flow of transactions was done through Plaid. The plaid transactions then flow into our GPT-4 model, and out comes a categorized transaction. We did this through MindsDB. Our database is Postgres, and we used Prisma as an ORM and Supabase to host it on the cloud. Everything from company and user information to the Plaid data, to the classified transactions, have all been stored in Postgres. We wrote our chatbot in Python by generating text embeddings by writing a parser

Challenges we ran into

One challenge we ran into was using MindsDB and getting it up and running. I had a 50 message long slack thread about this! However, the main challenge was figuring out how to make three people work together. If we all worked on the full stack, the git pushes and pulls would get confusing, and honestly we’d all slow each other down, so we decided to divide up the tasks in a way that everyone was working on something separate, such as the plaid integration for one person, the chatbot for another, and the classifying transactions and storing the data on the cloud and displaying the data to the user for another. Lastly, figuring out how to deploy to Vercel was also a little bit confusing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built this project literally from scratch from the moment Calhacks started. We’re pretty proud of that, and even though our project is very messy and “hacked” together, we got all the things we wanted to up and running.

What we learned

We learned about data pipelines such as mindsdb, we learned how to use plaid to pass financial transactions back and forth, we learned about vector embeddings, we learned about creating charts and graphs in React. It was very fun.

What's next for Aipeiron

We want to keep building this idea, and turn it into an actual company. The code right now works, but lacks refine. We will build the product fully, launch it, test it out with various companies, see if we can raise money, and try to turn it into an actual startup.

Built With

• mindsdb
• nextjs
• openai
• pineconedb
• plaid
• postgresql
• prisma
• react
• supabase
• typescript
• vectara