From Formula 3 to AI Accountants: Ariel Harmoko, Co-Founder & CEO @ Artifact

Today's Riding Unicorns is with Ariel Harmoko, Co-Founder and CEO of Artifact AI.

Ariel grew up in Jakarta, was thrown into Go Karts at eight, and went on to race professionally all the way to Formula 3. That early immersion in high performance teams, engineering and discipline now shapes how he operates as a founder.

A love of maths and science took him to boarding school in the UK, then into machine learning research at Cambridge while still a teenager, working on early diagnosis in medtech before deploying internal GPT tools at JP Morgan.

Today Ariel is building Artifact AI, an agent accountant that sits on top of ledgers like Xero, QuickBooks and NetSuite. The product tackles two huge problems for accounting firms. Fragmented legacy stacks and chronic staff shortages. Ariel talks through how firms think about accuracy, trust and auditability when adopting AI in financial workflows.

We cover:

• Selling into one of the most conservative industries in the world
• Founder led implementations and early GTM lessons
• Why advisory is the real margin in accounting
• How vertical AI and agentic workflows could reshape professional services
• The future of AI native accounting firms

A fascinating story told by someone who has already lived several lives before building one of the most ambitious companies in the category.

Listen here:

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Have a great day,
The Riding Unicorns team