Can AI finally rewrite the rules of corporate accounting—starting with the general ledger?
AI startup Rillet is on a mission to modernize one of the most entrenched—and overlooked—core systems in enterprise finance: the general ledger. Backed by Sequoia Capital, which led the company’s new $25 million Series A round, Rillet is positioning itself as a next-generation alternative to incumbents like NetSuite by using machine learning and generative AI to automate financial close processes and reporting.
“The general ledger is the beating heart of the finance function,” said Sequoia partner Julien Bek, “and so asking a company to remove it is a kind of open-heart surgery.” That’s precisely the surgery Rillet aims to perform—with a far lighter touch.
Founded three years ago by former N26 U.S. CEO Nicolas Kopp, Rillet connects directly to platforms like Salesforce, Stripe, Ramp, Brex, and Rippling, ingesting real-time data and auto-generating core financial statements such as income statements and balance sheets. According to Kopp, this reduces monthly and quarterly closing timelines from weeks to hours—without requiring teams to wrestle with clunky legacy tools.
The company’s AI-driven ledger now serves nearly 200 fast-growing midmarket firms, including Windsurf, the AI coding startup reportedly acquired by OpenAI, and Decagon, a $1.6B-valued AI customer support platform. Notably, a significant portion of Rillet’s growth has come from customers replacing NetSuite, a sign that enterprise-grade disruption may be underway.
Bek, once skeptical that startups could break into the general ledger space, now sees the tide turning. “Many companies can win small accounts. Replacing NetSuite? That’s a much harder, more valuable win.”
Rillet’s pitch goes beyond speed and automation. The platform claims to reduce the historical pain of migration—shrinking what used to be a months-long implementation down to four to six weeks, thanks to its layered AI stack. During the transition, clients can continue running legacy systems in parallel while data transfers into Rillet.
The $25M funding round follows a combined $13.5M in seed and pre-seed funding from First Round Capital, Creandum, and Susa Ventures. With fresh capital, Rillet plans to scale operations and deepen its product’s intelligence layer to meet growing demand from mid-sized companies outgrowing QuickBooks but wary of legacy ERP.
While Rillet’s main competition remains traditional platforms, other AI-first challengers are emerging. Digits, for example, is building a similar ledger solution—but focused on SMBs still using QuickBooks and Xero. For now, Rillet is carving out a niche in the underserved midmarket, where accounting complexity demands more than spreadsheets and email workflows, but agility still trumps enterprise bloat.
Enterprise Edge Take:
General ledger systems aren’t flashy, but they’re foundational—and Rillet’s fast-growing footprint suggests that mid-market CFOs are finally ready to automate the finance stack, not just report on it. If Rillet proves it can replace legacy systems at scale, it may not just win the category—it might redefine it.