For accounting teams, few tools are as vital as the general ledger. It’s the system that tracks every transaction and produces the balance sheets, income statements, and other core financial reports companies rely on. But despite its importance, the general ledger has remained largely unchanged for decades — until now. Rillet, a three-year-old startup founded by former N26 U.S. CEO Nicolas Kopp, is redefining the space with a machine learning and generative AI-powered general ledger platform.
On Wednesday, the company announced it raised a $25 million Series A round led by Sequoia Capital, with follow-on support from First Round Capital, Creandum, and Susa Ventures. This brings Rillet’s total funding to nearly $39 million.
AI-Powered Accounting: Faster Closes, Smarter Reports
Rillet connects directly to platforms like Stripe, Salesforce, Ramp, Brex, and Rippling to pull financial data in real time, generating accurate balance sheets and income statements with little human effort. Thanks to this automation, mid-sized companies using Rillet can close their books in hours rather than weeks — a massive leap in efficiency.
“The general ledger is the beating heart of finance,” said Julien Bek, a partner at Sequoia. “Asking a company to switch it is like open-heart surgery.” That’s why, until recently, VCs stayed away from investing in new general ledger platforms — too risky, too sticky.
But Bek changed his mind when he saw how Rillet was not just winning smaller startups but also replacing industry incumbents like NetSuite. In fact, he estimates that about a third of Rillet’s current deals are from companies switching off NetSuite or similar legacy systems.
Rillet’s approach also reduces the pain of switching. Migration that once took months now takes just 4–6 weeks. Companies can run Rillet in parallel with their existing system until the transition is complete, minimizing risk and downtime.
Replacing Legacy with Intelligence
Since launching its product just a year ago, Rillet has seen revenue grow 5x and now counts nearly 200 companies as customers. Notably, its roster includes high-growth names like Windsurf — the AI coding assistant reportedly acquired by OpenAI for $3 billion — and Decagon, an AI-powered customer support platform valued at $1.6 billion.
These are exactly the types of companies that, in the past, would have defaulted to NetSuite. But the legacy platform, first launched in the 1990s, hasn’t kept pace with modern finance workflows. “It’s slow, it’s clunky, and it doesn’t scale well with today’s AI-driven pace,” Kopp said.
Unlike other AI accounting tools such as Digits — which focuses on small businesses using QuickBooks or Xero — Rillet is targeting the underserved mid-market segment. And for now, it doesn’t face much direct competition in that space.
With $25 million in new capital, Rillet plans to accelerate product development, refine its AI capabilities, and scale adoption across finance teams that are ready to ditch spreadsheets and outdated software for faster, smarter financial reporting.
