When Elena Gonci was brought in to design a solution for the accounting industry, she faced a daunting challenge: firms were piecing together more than 60 separate software tools just to manage a single client relationship. Rather than accepting decades of technological fragmentation, she architected something radical: a unified platform powered by artificial intelligence that would condense hours of manual work into minutes. That design work launched Arrive Accounting from concept to a $35 million valuation in eighteen months.
Gonci's path to reimagining an entire industry reveals a designer who refused to accept the gap between vision and reality. She built her reputation on a singular principle: products must serve the people who use them, not the other way around. This philosophy, rooted in her academic research on inclusive design at Malmö University in Sweden, drives everything she does. Her master's thesis, "Communicating Inclusivity: A Study on Inclusive Design in Digital Products," examined how technology can accommodate diverse user needs—a framework she would later apply at scale with Arrive's 6,000 accounting clients across the country within just four months of launch.
The Designer Who Saw What Others Missed
Gonci's story begins far from Silicon Valley or venture capital circles. She began her career as a freelance designer fresh out of high school in Spain, working with clients who had genuine problems but often lacked the resources to develop effective solutions. Those early years taught her something essential: design isn't about making things look pretty. It's about understanding why people struggle and building pathways forward. After completing her bachelor's degree at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, she pursued her master's degree in Media and Communication Studies at Mälmo University in Sweden. Her focus remained on the human element—how to communicate complex ideas in a way that people could actually understand and apply.
That human-centered instinct became her calling card. Gonci moved into remote design work and eventually founded the Remote Designers chapter of Friends of Figma, where she now mentors over 126 design professionals internationally. Rather than simply managing a community, she used the platform to explore how design thinking could evolve in distributed teams. Her leadership attracted the attention of Blueprint Ventures, a venture capital firm seeking someone who could bridge the gap between product vision and execution—a rare combination.
When Arrive's CEO, Steven Gelley, identified the crisis within accounting firms, which were struggling with excessive software subscriptions, staff burnout, and technological fragmentation, he turned to Gonci. The industry was fifteen years technologically behind, requiring accountants to manually transfer data between incompatible systems, verify information repeatedly, and manage licensing costs. The work was brutal and expensive. Gonci's mandate: build the solution from scratch.
Building at the Intersection of AI and Design
What Gonci created with Arrive Accounting represented something larger than a software product. She orchestrated a platform that consolidated over 60 tools into one system, introducing an AI assistant called Ayyva that could automate workflows previously requiring five hours of human effort down to fifteen minutes. But the real achievement wasn't the technical consolidation—it was the user experience design that made accountants feel like the platform understood their actual workday.
She accomplished this by leading cross-functional teams of eighteen people spanning design, engineering, artificial intelligence, and quality assurance. Rather than handing off requirements between departments, Gonci maintained direct involvement in both strategic decisions and execution details. This hybrid role—part product leader, part practicing designer—meant she could catch contradictions between what was promised and what could actually be built. When teams faced tradeoffs, she mediated between ambitious technical capabilities and realistic user needs.
The results speak through measurable outcomes. At Blueprint Ventures, her product leadership delivered a 25% increase in portfolio company valuations and a 30% improvement in development speed across investments. Those weren't academic metrics—they reflected the actual impact of embedding product thinking into venture capital operations. At Arrive, the 6,000 clients adopting the platform within four months demonstrated that the market had been waiting for someone to solve this particular problem properly.
Bridging the Philosophy and the Product
What distinguishes Gonci's approach is her refusal to separate design philosophy from product execution. Her academic research on inclusive design wasn't filed away after graduation—it became an integral part of how she builds products. That thesis, downloaded over 900 times from Sweden's national repository for scholarly works, has been accessed by researchers and practitioners globally. But Gonci's actual influence extends far beyond citations. Her work shifted how the accounting industry thinks about AI adoption. The conversation moved from whether firms should implement AI to how they could do it effectively without sacrificing the human intelligence that makes accounting valuable.
As Gonci continues her work at Blueprint and Arrive, her trajectory demonstrates something increasingly rare in tech: a designer who thinks strategically enough to influence business decisions while remaining grounded enough to advocate for the people actually using the products. She moves between worlds, mentoring remote designers internationally, leading portfolio strategy at a venture firm, and architecting platforms that serve thousands. In each context, she asks the same fundamental question, "What problem are we actually solving, and are we solving it in a way that makes people's work better?" That alignment between purpose and execution defines her influence.
