Rillet, a startup that rebuilds corporate accounting around AI, has raised $100mn at a $1bn valuation, making it the latest AI unicorn. ICONIQ led the Series C, the company told Fortune in an exclusive. Nick Lichtenberg reported the deal. It is Rillet’s third raise in 14 months.
The backers are a roll-call of AI investors. Returning shareholders Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz and Oak HC/FT joined, Rillet said. New investors include Bain Capital Ventures, Battery Ventures, FirstMark, Scale Venture Partners and Creandum. The round takes total funding past $200mn, and ICONIQ general partner Seth Pierrepont is joining the board.
Rebuilding the general ledger
Rillet sells what it calls an AI-native ERP, the enterprise software that runs a company’s finances. Nicolas Kopp and Stelios Modes founded it in 2021, and it launched publicly in August 2024, Tech Funding News reported. Modes, the chief technology officer, previously ran the German neobank N26 in the US. The company says it ended its first year with 100 customers, then raised its Series A and B just ten weeks apart.
The pitch takes aim at the incumbents. Kopp argues that legacy systems from Oracle, SAP, Workday, Microsoft and NetSuite belong to a pre-AI era. They were built for humans to key in and check data, he says. Rillet calls itself “agent-first” instead. Its AI agents run hundreds of operations at once inside a real-time general ledger. Accountants review the work rather than enter it by hand.
Kopp framed the shift in stark terms. “For the last two decades, the ERP has been treated as a system of record, a place to store what already happened,” he said. “In the AI era, it has to become the operating layer for what happens next.” Finance agents “need to work inside the general ledger,” he said, not just draw data from it.
Fast growth, and a marquee customer
The numbers behind the raise are steep. Rillet doubled its new annual recurring revenue in the three months before the round. It now serves more than 600 customers, the company said. Agent activity across those customers is growing about 70 percent month on month, Kopp wrote. They include the AI firms Neuralink, Skild AI and Mercor, alongside public companies. About 40 percent now sit outside tech, in industries from waste recycling to film studios, Kopp told Fortune.
One customer does the heavy lifting in the sales pitch. Mercor uses Rillet’s agents to run a business scaling past $2bn in annual recurring revenue with a finance team of just three, according to the company. Pierrepont made the same point in the funding announcement. Customers are “multibillion-dollar businesses operating with finance teams a tenth the traditional size, closing their books continuously,” he said.
Kopp was careful about what that means for jobs. “Our message is not that we’re coming after jobs. That’s just not correct,” he told Fortune, stressing that accounting expertise is core to the product. He said the aim is to free finance chiefs from spreadsheet drudgery. “CFOs really struggle day to day. They can’t see their families on weekends,” he said. That message sits alongside a blunter one.
“We believe in lean, impactful finance teams,” Kopp wrote. He argues that controllers will spend less time reconciling and more on strategy. The two claims, fewer people and no lost jobs, are left for readers to weigh.
An old category, moving fast
Kopp credits recent model improvements for the pace. Accounting is “traditionally a very old, stodgy category,” he told Fortune, but tasks that once took a person a day now take minutes. “Especially in the last six months, things started lighting on fire in a good way,” he said.
He also casts a shrinking accounting workforce as an opening. The US has 340,000 fewer accountants than it did five years ago, Kopp wrote. He argues AI agents can help cover that gap. People are not leaving because AI threatens the job, he said, but because the work is drudgery.
Rillet has paired the sales push with establishment credibility. It launched an alliance with EY earlier this year. It also says it now partners with more than half of the Accounting Today top 20 CPA firms, along with KPMG and RSM, Tech Funding News reported. That matters for a product asking large companies to trust it with their books.
A crowded, cautious market
Rillet is not the only startup chasing this shift. Campfire, founded in 2023, has raised about $100mn from Accel and Ribbit and bills itself as a modern NetSuite, Tech Funding News reported. Others, such as Puzzle and Digits, target simpler bookkeeping for smaller firms. Rillet says it aims at more complex customers, including public companies.
The Information has described a broader trend of “QuickBooks challengers” fetching billion-dollar valuations.
The prize is large. The global ERP software market was worth $92.6bn in 2025 and is growing at about 13 percent a year, Tech Funding News reported, citing Fortune Business Insights. Rillet’s raise is a bet that AI can prise open a category the legacy giants have held for decades.
Whether it works is not settled. Finance departments are slow to change, and it is not yet clear whether this wave of startups will displace the incumbents or simply grow before becoming incumbents themselves, Tech Funding News noted.
Rillet joins a run of fast AI raises, from EliseAI to Higgsfield and Wispr, each promising to unseat an entrenched way of working. It also lands amid smaller enterprise-AI bets such as Prevalent AI. For now, Rillet has the money and the customers to make its case.
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