Rillet, an AI-native accounting startup, has raised $100 million in a Series C round at a $1 billion valuation, the company announced Tuesday. The round, led by ICONIQ Growth, came together in just 48 hours after a board meeting, according to co-founder and CEO Nicholas Koop.
The company, which emerged from stealth two years ago, has now raised a total of $200 million from top investors including ICONIQ, Andreessen Horowitz, and Sequoia. Rillet has amassed 600 customers, many of whom are switching from legacy accounting systems like Oracle and NetSuite, Koop said.
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From board meeting to unicorn in 48 hours
A few weeks ago, Rillet held a board meeting and shared its growth metrics with investors. The annualized revenue rate had doubled in the last quarter alone, and the startup added new clients, many of them public companies. Rillet also announced an alliance with EY to introduce AI tools to the auditing giant.
Koop said the company wasn’t even looking to raise capital. But after the board meeting, text messages were fired and calls were made, and 48 hours later, Rillet was a unicorn.
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Seth Pierrepont, general partner at ICONIQ who led the round, said the deal came together fast but “it wasn’t a cold start.” Rillet had already proven it could win against incumbents that have owned the accounting category for decades, he said. ICONIQ also invested in the company’s Series B, and with this latest round, Pierrepont joins the Rillet board.
Julien Bek, Sequoia’s lead investor on the deal, echoed that sentiment. “Rillet’s initial wedge is accounting, but ultimately they are reinventing the entire finance function,” Bek told TechCrunch, adding that agentic finance could become “one of the largest application software opportunities of the AI era.” Sequoia led Rillet’s Series A last summer.
Disrupting legacy players
Rillet is one of many AI-native startups giving legacy players a run for their money. Earlier this year, software stocks on the public market dipped as investors worried about how emerging AI tools would affect them. Koop thinks there’s some truth to that.
“AI is going to come hard at these legacy players,” he said, because it is giving customers compelling alternatives. Rillet, for example, was built for AI agents, not humans, letting humans work alongside the AI agents on corporate bookkeeping.
Rillet clients range from laundromats to the NFL Hall of Fame. Some 50% of Rillet customers come from Intuit, 30% from NetSuite and Sage Intacct, and 20% from Oracle, SAP, Workday, and Microsoft products, Koop said.
Security is critical when working with sensitive client data. Rillet includes model routing, so customers can redirect requests to the foundational model of their choice (like OpenAI or Anthropic), and Rillet’s harness prevents these models from training on their data, Koop said. There’s also no cross-training — meaning one customer’s data remains proprietary.
Governance and the future of accounting
About three months ago, Rillet released a governance feature letting accountants see and audit every decision the AI agent has made — including what numbers the agents pull and how they calculated them. Creating this was harder than it looks, Koop said, because the team had to compress agent data into a format humans could understand.
Koop said this feature was only possible to build recently because AI agents have gotten so powerful so quickly. They can, for example, now support multi-step workflows over longer periods of time. Because of that, auditing what they are doing has become even more important for clients.
“We barely scratched the surface of potential and opportunity that this technology has,” he said.
Right now, regulations for public companies require that every transaction made by an AI agent be approved by another human. Koop thinks regulators and top names are watching how the accounting industry evolves around this new technology. He’s hopeful that new rules and regulations will evolve that align more with where everything is headed.
“It’s a very normal process,” he said. “Similar to when the cloud came, of just getting everybody familiar with what’s going on and how it helps the profession.”
AI and the accountant shortage
Koop also doesn’t think mass job displacement from AI is coming anytime soon, especially in accounting. Stanford released a report a few weeks ago that found no widespread job displacement yet. He insists that Rillet isn’t a human replacement, not even for junior accountants. They can use Rillet to help automate and assist with some of the profession’s grunt work.
He also pointed out the expected shortage of accountants in the U.S. The number of those graduating with an accounting degree has been declining since at least 2010. In a recent report, the Controllers Council Organization found that 61% of finance leaders have struggled to find finance, accounting, and CPA talent in the past year.
The pullback is not entirely shocking: accountants’ hours are long, the pipeline to the top is arduous, the pay often doesn’t match the workload, and the work doesn’t appeal to everyone. At the same time, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has projected that accounting-related needs are expected to grow by at least 5%, adding 72,800 jobs by 2034. It also doesn’t expect AI to reduce the demand for accountants, even as the technology becomes more widespread.
“The automation of routine tasks, such as data entry, will instead make accountants’ advisory and analytical duties more prominent,” the BLS said.
“I just don’t see people losing their job anytime soon,” Koop said. “These people have started their professions to help businesses make better financial decisions. We can fully enable them to do that.”
Disclaimer: This article discusses a company’s fundraising and growth metrics. It is not financial advice, and the venture capital and AI software markets are volatile and uncertain. Past performance and growth figures do not guarantee future results.
