Briefcase, a UK startup looking to disrupt the accounting industry, has raised €2.8 million in a seed funding round led by Earlybird, in order to develop their AI-native accounting automation platform.
Other participants included Entrepreneur First, Tiny, and a group of angel investors, such as the founders of Pennylane, a prominent accounting tech unicorn, as well as executives from companies like Deel, Pleo, and 11X.
Reuben Steenkamp, CEO of Briefcase, said: “The accounting industry has only seen one major innovation in the past decade—the move from desktop to cloud. With the rise of multimodal AI, we’re positioned to lead the coming AI revolution.”
Founded by Reuben Steenkamp, formerly part of Starling Bank’s CFO office, and Jan Stehlik, who developed AI systems at fintech startup Nous, Briefcase is reportedly developing the first AI-native accounting automation platform. The platform seeks to automate traditionally manual processes like bookkeeping and month-end closing by leveraging multimodal AI, agentic workflows, and advanced embedding technologies. Briefcase aims to surpass existing solutions by integrating directly with popular ledger platforms like Xero and QuickBooks.
Briefcase’s automation capabilities address a pressing challenge in the accounting industry: the high volume of repetitive tasks and the difficulty in hiring and retaining junior staff. According to Briefcase, many firms in the UK have resorted to outsourcing, a practice that introduces quality concerns and management overhead.
Briefcase envisions a future where AI manages these time-intensive tasks, allowing accountants to focus on more strategic advisory roles that add value for clients.
The company is still in its pre-launch phase but is already collaborating with several UK accounting firms. A beta programme is underway, enabling early adopters to shape the product through iterative feedback and validation.
Earlybird Principal Akash Bajwa shared their conviction about team Briefcase: “LLMs, vision models, and the new scaling potential of reasoning unlock a completely new paradigm of automation in accounting than was possible before. We’ve been following this category for a long time and knew we had found the right team to execute against it after our first interaction with Reuben and Ján. They combine deep domain understanding with an incredible learning rate around the AI engineering needed to deliver truly agentic capabilities to this industry.”
The €2.8 million in seed funding will enable Briefcase to build out a team of engineers and product specialists, accelerate development, and scale operations to better serve its expanding base of early adopters.
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2024/12/london-based-briefcase-raises-e2-8-million-to-develop-ai-powered-accounting-automation/
