Light makes use of synthetic intelligence to automate firms’ finance and accounting features.
Light
Danish startup Light is the newest in a collection of European tech companies elevating money as enterprise capitalists seek for the subsequent large factor in synthetic intelligence.
Founded in 2022, Light develops software program that makes use of AI to automate numerous features that exist inside companies’ finance groups, together with accounting, bookkeeping and monetary reporting.
The Copenhagen-headquartered firm advised CNBC that it had raised $30 million in a Series A funding spherical led by Balderton Capital, an early investor in fintech unicorns Revolut and GoCardless.
Atomico, Cherry Ventures, Seedcamp and Entrée Capital additionally invested within the spherical, together with angel traders together with Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf and Meta board member Charlie Songhurst.
Light plans to make use of the money to “double down on the commercial side” of the enterprise, Jonathan Sanders, Light’s CEO and co-founder, advised CNBC. The startup lately opened an workplace in London and says it’s planning to open one in New York to satisfy U.S. demand.
Light is not the one startup on the market utilizing AI to streamline firms’ finance and accounting processes.
Pigment, a enterprise planning and forecasting platform designed to be extra user-friendly than Microsoft Excel, final 12 months raised $145 million at a valuation north of $1 billion. More lately, accounting software program startup Pennylane raised 75 million euros ($88.4 million), doubling its valuation to 2 billion euros.
Currently, the marketplace for software program that helps firms handle their funds is dominated by business behemoths like Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. However, these programs can usually be cumbersome, requiring specialists to “tinker around the edges for a year or two just to make it work,” based on Sanders.
“We service fast-growing, fast-scaling companies who need a system where they can expand really fast,” Sanders advised CNBC. Light’s prospects embrace Lovable, the buzzy Swedish AI firm lately valued at $2 billion, and Sana Labs, which is being acquired by Workday for $1.1 billion.
Sanders mentioned AI can quickly remodel how firms deal with their funds. “The future of numbers is text,” he says. For instance, reasonably than sifting by firm insurance policies to discover a group’s meal allowance, this may be automated by an AI agent that has entry to the related paperwork.
Moving ahead, Light desires to give attention to massive, enterprise-level prospects that battle with “broken processes and workflows,” based on Sanders. “No human team can continuously analyze, reconcile and update thousands of pages of policies for coherence,” he advised CNBC.
