A former Uber employee has raised $10m across two funding rounds for his automated accounting platform Stacks to fund its move into AI agents.
In April last year, EQT Ventures led a previously undisclosed $3m pre-seed round for the Amsterdam-based startup. Six months later, Stacks closed a further $7m round led by General Catalyst, with participation from early-stage investor s16vc and angel backers such as Gusto CFO Mike Taylor and Taktile CFO Simone Rüschenberg.
Founder and CEO Albert Malikov was previously a product manager at Uber, before joining US open banking fintech Plaid to head up product at the company’s European division.
A decade in the making
Founded in 2024, Stacks focuses on automating companies’ book closing, an accounting process that takes place at the end of every month. This involves preparing financial statements and reconciling accounts to create a clear snapshot of a company’s financial position and can take up the majority of a company finance team’s time.
Malikov says this time-intensive process is currently reliant on painful and manual processes “like Excel spreadsheets” that can take over ten days. It’s a problem he first encountered during his role at Uber.
“We were looking for a solution that could solve this, but we couldn’t find anything then,” he says.
Ten years later, Malikov founded Stacks to make the closing process as simple as one click. Stacks offer a set of AI tooling to streamline the monthly close process that syncs with an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, a software program used to manage a company’s core functions.
These include a workspace specifically designed for the closing process as well as AI tools to automate journal entries and reconciliation, the process of comparing and verifying two sets of financial records to ensure they match and are accurate.
Companies pay a subscription fee to use Stacks, with different tiers based on the size of the client. There are currently around a dozen companies using Stacks, says Malikov including fintechs such as Juni and Volt — both of which have managed to significantly cut down on time spent on reconciliation.
“We significantly reduced the time they spent on reconciliation,” he says. “Up to 97% of the manual reconciliations they were doing, we managed to automate.”
Accounting agents
Malikov says much of the funding will be used to further build out its AI agent product, which Stacks is currently beta testing with a select group of clients.
For example, companies can hire agents to analyse financial data and automate the repetitive tasks involved in the reconciliation process. After completion, a senior member of the finance team will review the work completed by the agent.
“The human is always making the final decision and approval of the work,” he says.
Stack’s funding round is another example of the continued VC excitement over AI agents. So far this year European startups building AI agents have picked up close to half a billion in funding, according to Sifted data — more than a quarter of the funds raised by such startups across 2024.
It’s also the latest startup building for another buzzy niche — the office of the CFO — to raise funding and is another sign B2B fintech, and not consumer, is continuing to catch the eye of Europe’s VCs. Last year, B2B fintechs raised $6.4bn while their consumer-focused counterparts received close to half of that with $3.7bn funneled into B2C fintechs according to Dealroom.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/ai-accounting-startup-funding-news/
