The AI-native ERP built by accountants - out to retire the accounting software of the 20th century.
The purple "R." A four-year-old startup in San Francisco, staffed with fifty-odd CPAs, telling Oracle and Intuit that the month-end close does not, in fact, have to take until the middle of next month.
There is a small, unglamorous tragedy that plays out in finance departments every single month. The quarter ends. And then - and this is the part that makes founders lie awake - nobody actually knows how the quarter went for another week or ten days, because someone has to close the books first.
Rillet's whole reason for existing is a mild irritation with that delay. The company, founded in 2021 and out of stealth in 2024, sells what it calls an "AI-native ERP" - enterprise resource planning software, the category that Oracle's NetSuite and Intuit's QuickBooks have owned for a generation. Rillet's pitch is that those incumbents were architected in a different technological era, before real-time data and machine learning, and that bolting AI onto them is a bit like putting a turbocharger on a horse.
The more interesting claim is who built it. Rillet's founding product team was seeded with more than fifty CPAs from the Big Four accounting firms, plus operators who had suffered through legacy ERP rollouts. This is an inversion of the usual startup order of operations, in which engineers build a thing and then go looking for accountants to explain why it's wrong. Here the accountants wrote the spec. If you have ever tried to reconcile a bank statement by hand, you understand why this matters: the people who feel the pain designed the anesthetic.
The founder is Nicolas Kopp, who was previously the US chief executive of the German neobank N26 and, before that, spent five years at Morgan Stanley in London and Hong Kong. His co-founder and CTO is Stelios Modes, who built payment infrastructure at N26. The two did not discover accounting software as a market opportunity so much as develop a grudge against it while running finance functions that ran on it. That is generally the better origin story - grievance tends to outlast a total-addressable-market slide.
The product does roughly what a full ERP does, minus the twelve-month implementation. There is an automated general ledger, accounts receivable and payable, bank reconciliation, close management, and GAAP reporting that bends to fit whatever entity structure a company has grown into. Rillet claims it automates about 93% of manual journal entries and matches better than 95% of bank reconciliation lines without a human touching them. An AI layer the company calls Aura reads a company's past vendor bills and service periods and drafts accrual suggestions, which is the sort of quietly useful thing that does not make for a thrilling demo but makes an accountant's shoulders drop an inch.
Every transaction is processed as it happens, so the month-end close stops being a fire drill and becomes something closer to a running total. Customers report cutting close cycles to a few days.
Revenue schedules are generated straight from contracts and invoices - usage-based, multi-element, deferred - without third-party bolt-ons or heavy customization.
The AI reads historical vendor bills and service periods to suggest accruals and journal entries, flag reconciliation errors, and hand the accountant a decision instead of a spreadsheet.
Payments, subscriptions and CRM revenue flow in automatically, with each payment tied to the right invoice and contract at a claimed 99.999% match rate.
Revenue waterfall, retention cohorts and board metrics surface directly from the general ledger - no separate BI stack, no CSV gymnastics.
Intercompany journals, FX re-evaluation and multi-entity consolidation for companies that have outgrown a single-ledger tool but dread a NetSuite migration.
The fundraising cadence tells its own story. Rillet closed a $25M Series A led by Sequoia in the spring of 2025, and roughly ten weeks later announced a $70M Series B co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and ICONIQ, with Sequoia and Oak HC/FT along for the ride. Investors do not usually re-up that fast on narrative. They re-up that fast on retention - when customers switch and don't switch back.
| Round | Amount | Date | Lead Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | ~$13.5M | 2024 | First Round, Susa Ventures, Anthemis |
| Series A | $25M | May 2025 | Sequoia Capital |
| Series B | $70M | Aug 2025 | Andreessen Horowitz, ICONIQ, Sequoia, Oak HC/FT |
"We built an AI-native ERP - not legacy software retrofitted with AI features, but infrastructure architected for automation from day one."
- Rillet
Rillet's customer list - more than 500 companies, including public ones running north of $1 billion in ARR - reads like a cross-section of the internet economy. There is Kickstarter and Sotheby's, Foursquare and Postscript, and the AI coding company Windsurf. What they share is a moment in a company's life: too big for QuickBooks, not masochistic enough to sign up for a year-long NetSuite implementation. Rillet's four-week onboarding is aimed precisely at that gap.
The endorsement that should worry the incumbents most is not a customer but a channel. Rillet counts EY, KPMG and RSM among its partners - which is to say, some of the very firms whose armies of accountants stand to be automated are helping deploy the software that does it. When your would-be disruption targets become your distribution, you have stopped arguing with the market and started leading it.
The competitive set is exactly who you would guess: NetSuite and Sage Intacct at the enterprise end, QuickBooks and Xero below, Workday Financials above, and a cohort of newer startups - Puzzle, Campfire - circling the same idea. Rillet's differentiation is less about a single feature than about a bet on architecture: that a system designed for automation and real-time data from the first line of code will, over time, simply do more of the work than one designed to be automated later.
Nicolas Kopp and Stelios Modes start building an AI-native ERP after years of accounting frustration in fintech and banking.
Rillet launches publicly with a product built by a team of 50+ CPAs from Big Four firms.
Sequoia Capital leads the round to accelerate growth across the mid-market.
Andreessen Horowitz and ICONIQ co-lead, pushing total funding past $100M in under a year.
Rillet crosses 500 customers, including public companies with over $1B ARR, and doubles its ARR.
"We can provide visibility into performance in a few hours rather than expecting finance teams and company leaders to wait weeks for critical data."
- Nicolas Kopp, Co-Founder & CEO"Not legacy software retrofitted with AI features, but infrastructure architected for automation from day one."
- Rillet, on what "AI-native" means