Rillet raises $25M from Sequoia to automate general ledger systems using AI

Summary

For accounting departments, no software is more important than the general ledger system. It’s the central hub that summarizes all financial transactions, providing the essential data needed to create accurate financial statements. “The general ledger is the beating heart of the finance function, and so asking a company to remove it is a kind of open-heart surgery,” said Julien Bek, a partner at Sequoia Capital. Until a few years ago, Bek believed that VCs wouldn’t dare to invest in startups building new general ledger software. It’s not only difficult to get customers to switch from their existing accounting software, but building a new general ledger business is also very challenging, he explained. Bek changed his mind when he discovered Rillet, a three-year-old company leveraging machine learning and generative AI to automate accounting reports. Rillet directly pulls data from their customers’ banks and platforms, such as Salesforce, Stripe, Ramp, Brex and Rippling, to generate essential financial statements, including the balance sheet and income statement. Rillet founder Nicolas Kopp (pictured above) says thanks to machine learning and AI, his company’s software enables accounting and finance teams at medium-sized companies to close their monthly or quarterly books in hours, a process that previously took weeks. Prior to Rillet, Kopp was U.S. CEO of European neobank N26. Since launching its product last year, Rillet’s revenue has grown five-fold, and it has brought on nearly 200 customers, including fast-growing companies like Windsurf, the AI coding assistant reportedly sold to OpenAI for $3 billion, and Decagon, an AI customer support startup reportedly valued at $1.6 billion. In the past, companies of that size would likely have installed NetSuite, general ledger software developed in the late 1990s that is still very popular with middle-sized companies. But NetSuite is slow and clunky. “I think a third of their deals are coming from [customers] replacing Ne...