Daniel Kim and Jay Lee met on a junior-high basketball court in Cerritos. Years later, they still disagreed about who won. On another question, they found agreement: the software available to auditors was making a demanding job unnecessarily tedious. Their friendship would eventually produce AuditBoard, a company built around work that rarely inspires a dinner-party anecdote. Evidence requests. Control testing. The spreadsheet someone has helpfully renamed “final.”
Kim had earned the right to complain. He began his career at PwC, spent more than a decade in auditing, and led global audit functions at two public companies. He knew the work from the inside. By 2014, he and Lee were ready to turn that familiarity into software. Ten years later, AuditBoard agreed to a transaction valued at more than $3 billion.
Between those two dates sits the more interesting part of Kim’s story: learning which frustrations deserve a company, persuading people to take an unfashionable problem seriously, and eventually handing the chief executive’s job to someone else.
The hours nobody wanted to invoice
Audit work asks people to exercise judgment, then surrounds that judgment with administration. Someone must request the evidence, track the reply, document the test, and establish which version a reviewer actually approved. Kim’s early writing returns to this imbalance. Experienced professionals were spending time maintaining the machinery of compliance when their expertise could be used elsewhere.
In 2016, he described a typical business with 200 key controls, tested as many as three times a year. At five hours per test, the arithmetic reached 3,000 hours before the surrounding administrative work. Those figures were an illustration of the workload he wanted to address, rather than a promise that software could make every hour disappear. The distinction matters. The auditor still has to think.
Illustrative annual workload in Kim’s early writing. Administrative work comes on top.
His proposed remedy was practical: use technology to carry more of the repetitive work. Tracking changes and preparing reports should consume less of the time bought for professional judgment. There is a particular kind of business insight in noticing how much effort people expend before they can begin the task they were hired to do.
Kim had been looking for better tools long before he sold them. In 2019, he said he had spent ten years searching for an audit software solution. That prolonged search gives his founding decision a different texture from the familiar sudden revelation. An irritation can survive several budgeting cycles before someone decides it deserves a product.
A friendship with a useful disagreement
Kim and Lee grew up in Cerritos and graduated from Whitney High School. Both entered the auditing profession, Kim at PwC and Lee at EY. Their careers then diverged: Lee moved into private equity while Kim continued in audit leadership. When they founded the company in 2014, they brought a shared professional vocabulary and different subsequent experiences to the same table.
The basketball connection is appealing because it predates the business case. Before customers, investors, and board meetings, there was a friendship. It also supplies a modest corrective to the solemnity of a corporate origin story. A pair of founders can agree on the future of enterprise software while maintaining separate accounts of a schoolyard result.
Their first product was SOXHUB, designed around Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. It gave the venture a specific starting point: a defined set of obligations and the people responsible for carrying them out. A customer did not need to buy an abstract theory about the future of work. There was a recognisable job to make easier.
Southern California was part of the decision, too. The founders chose to build locally, drawing on the talent around them. Cerritos was both their hometown and the company’s early base. The route from school friends to software founders did not require a ceremonial relocation to Silicon Valley.
Build for the person entering the data
Kim’s product argument concerns who gets considered first. The executive who approves a purchase and the auditor who uses the software all day have different encounters with it. A dashboard may satisfy one while a cumbersome workflow exhausts the other. Kim placed unusual weight on that second encounter.
In explaining AuditBoard’s approach, he emphasised the people doing the daily entries and the value of employing former auditors. That experience could inform the small choices that accumulate into a usable product. When a system is awkward, the spreadsheet remains close at hand. A vendor has to give someone a reason to leave it there.
“We were focused not on who was the ultimate buyer, but who was the ultimate user.”
Daniel Kim, 2020
This gives a concrete meaning to his emphasis on customers. The product must work at the point where the customer’s work actually happens. An audit leader’s overview and an individual auditor’s task should belong to the same working system. Otherwise, a polished report can conceal a great deal of manual assembly.
By November 2017, SOXHUB had become AuditBoard. The new name accommodated a broader scope across audit, risk, and compliance. The original problem had opened onto neighbouring work. Once a team had a place to organise controls and evidence, it could see reasons to connect more of its responsibilities.
The market catches up with the complaint
In August 2018, AuditBoard announced a $40 million Series B led by Battery Ventures. Michael Brown joined its board. The investment placed Kim’s working knowledge of audit alongside an investor’s view of software for finance teams. Cloud tools were reaching more of the finance function, and AuditBoard had customers already using its approach.
A year later, the numbers became conspicuous. AuditBoard placed third in Deloitte’s 2019 Technology Fast 500 for North America, with revenue growth of 16,682% over 2015-2018. A growth percentage measures the change from a starting base; it is not a revenue total. Even with that qualification, the result made an awkward argument for anyone who thought audit software was too narrow to matter.
- 2014Kim and Lee found the business that starts as SOXHUB.
- 2017The company takes the AuditBoard name.
- 2018A $40 million Series B brings Battery Ventures onto the board.
- 2019No. 3 in Deloitte’s North American Technology Fast 500.
- 2020Scott Arnold becomes CEO; the founders become board co-chairs.
- 2024Hg acquisition agreement values the business at over $3 billion.
Recognition also came closer to home. Kim and Lee won EY’s 2019 Greater Los Angeles Entrepreneur Of The Year award in Emerging Business Software, then became national finalists in the Emerging category. Kim’s stated ambition remained closely tied to the profession he had left: give auditors more room for the work that helps an organisation make decisions.
That year’s first annual user conference brought hundreds of internal audit professionals to Huntington Beach. The founders took the stage to discuss the journey from Big Four auditing to building technology. There is a pleasing specificity to that audience: people who understood the problem without needing a translation of every acronym.
Making room for another CEO
Kim’s next consequential decision concerned his own job. In July 2020, AuditBoard announced Scott Arnold as president and chief executive. Kim and Lee would become co-chairs of the board and continue advising on strategy and growth. The company was asking a different question of leadership as its scale changed.
Kim publicly explained the appointment in terms of expanding the team and finding enterprise software experience suited to the next phase. His own experience had helped identify and build the opportunity. Arnold brought a history of running software businesses. Founding a company and supplying every stage of its management are separate undertakings, even when the business card makes them look continuous.
The handoff also keeps the later milestones in proportion. Under Arnold, AuditBoard passed $200 million in annual recurring revenue in late 2023. Kim helped establish the product and culture; the subsequent business reflected the work of a wider leadership team and hundreds of employees. A founder’s story becomes more accurate when it leaves room for those people.
In May 2024, Hg announced the acquisition agreement valued at more than $3 billion. Kim returned to the original purpose in his statement: using software to address the serious challenges of an auditor’s job. The language of the transaction was larger than the language of the founding problem. The connection between them was still easy to follow.
A new name, an old question
The company continued to change after the deal. It reported more than $300 million in annual recurring revenue in October 2025. In March 2026, under CEO Raul Villar Jr., AuditBoard became Optro, reflecting a wider business spanning audit, compliance, information security, and risk. These are later chapters in the company Kim co-founded, with their own leaders and decisions.
Looking back, the revealing detail is how concrete his original ambition was. Auditors already had responsibilities, deadlines, and expertise. What Kim wanted to change was the amount of effort spent arranging the work around them. That is an unusually grounded place to begin a software company: take a profession seriously enough to notice what wastes its time.
The basketball score can remain unsettled. The business that grew out of the friendship has a more orderly record: a specialised product, a broader platform, a leadership transition, and a multibillion-dollar acquisition. For someone whose career began in audit, it is an appropriately documented way to make a point.