Cifrato Wants to Do the Accounting Nobody Wants to Do
A Y Combinator-backed startup from Bogota is aiming its AI agents at the least glamorous corner of finance: typing invoices into an ERP. The bet is that Latin America's most manual workflow is also its biggest opening.
Juan Pisco found his billion-dollar problem in a place most founders never look: the back office of his family's restaurant in Bogota. Someone there was doing what accountants across Latin America still do every single day - taking a stack of paper and electronic invoices and typing them, one by one, into an accounting system. The workflow had not changed in decades. Pisco, who wrote machine-learning code at 16 and sold his first company at 19, saw a job that a machine could do.
That observation became Cifrato, a Y Combinator Winter 2025 company that builds AI agents for accounting firms and retail businesses. The pitch is narrow and specific: not a chatbot that answers questions about accounting, but software that actually performs the work - capturing invoices, classifying them, applying taxes, reconciling payments, and pushing clean data into the tools accountants already use.
The unglamorous $1 billion problem
In much of Latin America, governments already mandate electronic invoicing. In Colombia, that means the tax authority, DIAN, sits on a structured record of transactions. In Mexico, it is the SAT. The data exists - it is just trapped. Businesses still pay people to log into government portals, download invoices, read them, decide which accounting category each one belongs to, key it into an ERP or point-of-sale system, and then reconcile it all against bank statements. Multiply that by every small business in a country and you get an enormous, invisible tax on time.
Cifrato's answer is to start where the data is cleanest. Its agents sync directly with the tax authority, pull the electronic invoices automatically, and take over the downstream steps that used to require a human at a keyboard. In its first year, the company says it processed more than a million invoices representing over $1 billion in value.
How the machine actually works
The product is best understood as a pipeline. Each stage removes a task that a bookkeeper used to do by hand, and each stage feeds the next.
Sync
Pulls electronic invoices straight from DIAN, SAT and other tax platforms.
›Classify
Assigns invoice type and accounting fields automatically.
›Reconcile
Matches payments, applies taxes, flags exceptions in real time.
›Sync ERP
Sends accounting-ready data into Siigo, World Office, Siesa, Alegra.
The number Cifrato leads with is 98.7% accuracy. How it gets there is the interesting part. Rather than trusting a single model to read a messy invoice, the company runs a consensus approach - multiple AI models cross-checking each other - and pairs it with human feedback. An accountant corrects an edge case once, and the system remembers how that vendor bills that kind of business next time. The manual work does not disappear so much as it converts into training signal.
Boring, but it scales
Within twelve months of turning on commercial operations, Cifrato reports reaching roughly $1 million in annual recurring revenue, with 270-plus direct clients that indirectly touch some 3,500 businesses. The 2026 target is more ambitious: about $5 million ARR and 10,000-plus businesses. It is a B2B SaaS model in a market where the buyers - accounting firms and retailers - feel the pain of manual data entry every close.
Who's behind it
Pisco is the technical, unusually early founder - ML algorithms at 16 for a San Francisco biotech, no university, a first company sold at 19, and a travel-planning app, tripplanner.ai, that grew to 3 million users in 18 months before being acquired. His co-founder, Yerson Cacua, brings the scaling scar tissue: he was VP of Technology at Rappi and co-founded Sumer, which passed a million users. The team splits roughly evenly between engineering and sales, a signal of a company that treats distribution as seriously as the model.
| Founded | 2025 · Bogota, Colombia |
|---|---|
| Batch | Y Combinator, Winter 2025 |
| Founders | Juan Pisco (CEO), Yerson Cacua |
| Seed investors | Y Combinator, Fen Ventures, Decelera Ventures, Kuiper |
| Integrations | DIAN, SAT · Siigo, World Office, Siesa, Aspel, Alegra |
| Reported accuracy | 98.7% |
Where it sits in the market
The incumbents in Latin American accounting software - names like Siigo and Alegra - are where the data ends up. Cifrato is deliberately not trying to be another ERP. It positions itself as the automation layer above them, the thing that fills those systems without a human doing the typing. That framing matters: instead of asking firms to rip out software they already run, Cifrato offers to remove the labor that feeds it.
The strategic bet worth noting is the starting point. By beginning at the tax authority - where a government mandate has already digitized every invoice - Cifrato sidesteps the messy problem of scattered inputs and builds on structured data. The seed money is going toward more ERP and POS integrations, a scaling infrastructure, and a new AI-driven bank reconciliation module, which is where the genuinely hard matching problems live.
Whether Cifrato becomes the default depends on execution across borders and the durability of that 98.7% figure as volume grows. But the underlying insight is hard to argue with. The most manual workflows are often the most defensible ones to automate, because nobody built good software for them in the first place.