This week on Tech Can’t Save Us, host Paul David is joined by Ahikam Kaufman, Co-Founder and CEO of SafeBooks AI, a San Francisco-based platform building the world’s first financial data graph for the office of the CFO and Chief Accounting Officer. SafeBooks connects fragmented data across CRM, billing, and ERP systems into a single, agent-ready layer that automates complex contract reviews and protects revenue recognition integrity from contract to cash.

They discuss how the office of the CFO has been left behind by the automation wave that reshaped sales, marketing, and support, with finance teams still stitching data together by hand across systems that were never designed to talk to each other. Ahikam explains how the SafeBooks financial data graph creates a unified, automated audit trail that reconciles every transaction, executes booking and billing policies on each one, and documents the work, turning the finance professional from a preparer into a reviewer. With SOC 1 certification and audit-readiness by design, the platform shifts revenue assurance from periodic, reactive close-process checks to continuous, real-time control, all without ripping out the systems companies already run.

The conversation covers the realities of selling specialised software into conservative finance teams: why the heavy lifting is proving the technology on a customer’s own data, how strategic partnerships with accounting firms and ERP providers can accelerate go-to-market, and why Ahikam believes B2B buying is ultimately emotional. He also shares the lessons behind building SafeBooks, drawing on a career that includes co-founding Check (acquired by Intuit) and senior finance roles at HP, Mercury, and Intuit, from hiring people smarter than you in every domain to staying relentless about adapting as AI rewrites the SaaS playbook and enterprises start demanding tailored solutions over cookie-cutter products.

Find more about SafeBooks AI here: https://safebooks.ai/
Follow Ahikam Kaufman here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ahikam-kaufman-688310/

This week on Tech Can’t Save Us, host Paul David is joined by Erika Anderson and Andalib Samandari, Founder and AI Researcher of Building Humane Technology, a grassroots movement and public benefit corporation working to make humane design the default rather than the exception. Together they co-created HumaneBench, an open-source framework measuring whether AI models respect human well-being, and how easily those protections collapse under pressure.

They discuss how the movement grew out of Tristan Harris’s Center for Humane Technology and a deceptively simple question: what does it mean to build technology that makes people feel cared for, connected, and present? Andalib explains how the team turned that into a working benchmark, using synthetic scenarios, a rubric scored from minus one to one, and LLM judges validated against manual scoring, all grounded in eight humane principles. The findings are sobering: across 15 leading models, most nudged users toward prolonged engagement, and 67% could be manipulated into giving harmful advice through adversarial prompting.

The conversation covers how HumaneBench is moving from research into practice, running live in production code bases like Storytell.ai, where humane evals show product teams how their LLM actually treats users and have even shaped new features. Erika and Andalib make the case for nutrition facts for AI and a certified-humane standard, and argue regulation has a role to play, citing the EU’s line that AI is less regulated than a San Francisco food truck. Throughout, they return to Donella Meadows’ idea of dancing with systems: that the biggest leverage point isn’t a single villain to defeat, but the culture and paradigms we build technology inside.

Find more about Building Humane Technology here: https://humanebench.ai/

Follow Erika Anderson here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikamanderson/
Follow Andalib Samandari here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andalibsamandari/

This week on Tech Can’t Save Us, host Paul David is joined by Paula Chiocchi, Founder & CEO of Outward Media, a B2B data and digital marketing company that helps firms turn data into revenue. Over 27 years, Paula has built one of the world’s largest SMB databases and driven hundreds of millions in revenue for Fortune 500 clients, including more than 300 million for a single client in one year, through high-quality contact data and multi-channel marketing solutions.

They discuss how B2B marketing has shifted from breadth and depth toward pinpoint accuracy, and why the true measure of data is whether the right contact is matched to the right company, title, and function. Paula explains Outward Media’s concept of the “B2B Living File,” a model of constant, automated maintenance that keeps client data fresh through monthly cleanses and replacements rather than the static snapshot licensing many providers still rely on. She also unpacks the company’s industry-first 95% email validity guarantee and the 15-plus verification steps behind it.

The conversation explores the growth roadblocks facing data-driven marketers, from siloed teams and eroding CRM data to the rising tide of programmatic fraud, and the shift from lead volume to genuinely qualified leads. Paula also reflects on her journey as a leader and entrepreneur: her passion for mentorship, two decades in a Vistage CEO peer group, and a guiding belief that silence in a meeting means agreement. She closes on the technology that excites and concerns her in equal measure, AI, and why blending a Zen perspective with the high-stakes world of B2B marketing keeps the work both grounded and human.

Find more about Outward Media here: Outward Media
Follow Paula Chiocchi here: LinkedIn

This week on Tech Can’t Save Us, host Paul David is joined by Arnon Shimoni, VP of Growth at Solvimon, a next-generation billing monetization platform. Headquartered in the Netherlands, Solvimon is designed to help modern SaaS companies navigate hybrid business models and the shifting landscape of usage-based pricing.

They discuss the evolution of software billing, analyzing why traditional seat-based models are giving way to usage-based options as companies look for new ways to grow revenue. Arnon highlights the dangerous traps and complexities of leaning too heavily into credits and tokens, which can disincentivize product usage and detach customer value from the actual compute cost.

The conversation dives deep into the “holy grail” of monetization for autonomous AI agents: pricing per outcomes rather than inputs. Arnon shares real-world examples, including how a mortgage-processing agent aligns vendor and bank motivations through shared incentives. They also tackle the technical and financial hurdles that modern CFOs face regarding forecasting and compliance and why a flexible, unified revenue stack is crucial for scaling businesses.

Finally, Arnon outlines Solvimon’s regional growth strategy and his bullish outlook on the European tech ecosystem. He notes why European companies have historically been underserved by rigid American payment tools and wraps up with a unique go-to-market lesson: viewing invoices as critical, underappreciated touchpoints to showcase culture and human value.

Find more about Solvimon here: www.solvimon.com
Follow Arnon Shimoni here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arnon-shimoni

This week on Tech Can’t Save Us, host Paul David is joined by Ignacio Berardi, Co-Founder and CEO of Rexi, an AI-native financial operations platform rebuilding the infrastructure layer beneath modern fintech. Rexi automates reconciliation, accelerates financial close, and replaces fragile manual back-office workflows with intelligent agentic systems — building what Ignacio describes as the operating system for modern finance.

They discuss how the rapid proliferation of application-layer fintech providers has created a fragmented, modular financial stack in which money movement passes through multiple abstraction layers, making end-to-end transaction tracking increasingly difficult and resulting in systemic balance-sheet write-offs of one to two percent of total payment volume — a problem the Synapse collapse made viscerally real when over $160 million in user funds went unaccounted for overnight. Ignacio explains how Rexi approaches this as fundamentally a coordination problem: ingesting data files from disparate systems, parsing and standardising them with AI at speed, and deploying agents trained across the full portfolio of customer edge cases to investigate discrepancies and close out the long tail of exceptions that human teams routinely write off.

The conversation covers Rexi’s go-to-market approach — founder-led, in-person sales targeting operators rather than crowded enterprise conferences, with six-to-eight-week forward-deployed implementations designed to build trust inside critical financial infrastructure. With a seed round targeted for Q3 2026 and the team approaching 50k MRR, Ignacio explains why brand and relationships, not product features, will be the lasting competitive differentiator in an AI-commoditised market. He also shares hard-won leadership lessons drawn from Bain, Bitso, and Harvard Business School, and why no amount of prior experience truly prepares a founder for the consequential, real-time decisions of building a company from scratch.

Find more about Rexi here: https://Rexi.finance

Follow Ignacio Berardi here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ignacio-Berardi/

This week on Tech Can’t Save Us, host Paul David is joined by Kim Smith, Founder and CEO of Health Evolve, a South Carolina-based femtech company building patient-centred technologies at the intersection of care and culture. Kim founded Health Evolve in 2023 following the loss of her daughter Lauren to HELLP Syndrome, naming the company’s flagship platform in her honour.

They discuss why the patient’s voice is the most underrated lever in closing health equity gaps, and how Health Evolve co-designed Lauren — with birthing women, nurses, and physicians across urban and rural communities — to be genuinely inclusive. Lauren supports women across a full 100 weeks of care, from preconception through early parenting, combining remote blood pressure and glucose monitoring, an AI-driven personalised education curriculum, and a telemedicine suite with real-time translation to fill the critical gaps between a high-risk woman’s average six hours of provider contact throughout pregnancy.

The conversation covers how Health Evolve is navigating long enterprise sales cycles by building a Research and Community Partnerships division as a deliberate profit centre, with an active clinical validation study at South Carolina’s largest academic hospital and a data partnership with the University of South Carolina drawing on 50 years of birth data. Kim also shares leadership lessons from 18 years spanning Tenet Healthcare’s 24 national markets, and her approach to protecting mental health whilst carrying a life-or-death mission — including her first-ever Power 24, a quarterly solo reset she’s making non-negotiable.

Find more about Health Evolve here: https://healthevolve.co

Follow Kim Smith here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimsmithceo/

This week on Tech Can't Save Us, host Paul David is joined by Julio Martinez-Clark, co-founder and CEO of BioAccess, the world's first contract research organization (CRO) purpose-built specifically for first-in-human (FIH) clinical trials. They discuss the "valley of death" that claims roughly 90% of healthcare startups, which frequently fail not because their technology is flawed, but because they run out of capital before securing vital clinical data.

Julio explains how BioAccess helps medtech, biopharma, and radiopharma startups bypass these bottlenecks by compressing clinical timelines by 40% through efficient, predictable site selection and activation in regulatory-friendly Latin American markets. The conversation covers BioAccess's self-funded growth strategy, common pitfalls made by first-time founders, and how providing low-income patients with compassionate, advanced healthcare brings dignity back to clinical research. Julio also reflects on his time writing his book, La Cebolla de Pandora, and how that period of reflection shaped his deep commitment to prioritizing human impact over profit.

Healthcare startups face a high monthly burn rate averaging $300,000 to $400,000, making rapid first-in-human clinical data crucial to surviving the "valley of death" before they can raise more capital or secure an exit. Cost-efficiency in Latin American clinical settings does not mean lower standards, as all trials strictly adhere to the international ICH and GCP guidelines required by the FDA and EMA.

By leveraging an extensive network of hospitals and regulatory-friendly environments in countries like Panama and El Salvador, BioAccess achieves rapid site activation and patient recruitment.

Beyond the B2B framework, accelerating these trials democratizes access to life-saving medical innovations for lower-income patient populations who otherwise lack treatment options.

Find more about BioAccess here: https://www.bioaccessla.com

Follow Julio Martinez-Clark here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliomartinezclark/

This week on Tech Can't Save Us, host Paul David is joined by Vojtech Oravec, the founder of Ranketta, an innovative platform helping companies measure and optimize their visibility within AI-driven search engines and answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity. With a deep background as an AI research scientist and enterprise product manager, Vojtech is now building the tools brands need to stay relevant in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.

They discuss the fundamental shift from traditional Google searches to AI-generated answers, exploring why direct answers are replacing the classic "10 blue links" and what this behavioral shift means for modern brands. Vojtech outlines the critical mistakes companies make when trying to establish AI visibility, such as completely blocking AI bots, relying on inaccurate API approximations, and focusing on brand visibility over more crucial product-level metrics.

The conversation dives deep into the world of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and how Ranketta bridges the visibility gap by scraping actual user interfaces to analyze citations, influential keywords, and product recommendation rates. Vojtech provides actionable insights for marketing teams, ranging from content enrichment with frequently asked questions to targeting specific AI-preferred keywords, while explaining how Ranketta integrates directly into existing workflows like Google Analytics and Shopify.

Vojtech also shares his strategic growth plans following Ranketta's recent €1 million pre-seed funding round, including scaling their dynamic team, achieving key revenue milestones, and establishing a crucial US beachhead to capture the fast-evolving AI shopping market. Finally, he reflects on his personal journey from navigating high-level AI research alongside famous scientists to becoming a tech founder at the cutting edge of the next generation of the internet.

Find more about Ranketta here: https://ranketta.com
Follow Vojtech here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vojtech-oravec-091409236/