Tech News

AccountsIQ raises $65M to power bookkeeping tool with AI

While Europe’s economies remain shaky, there’s a silver lining for enterprise startups: Companies building tools to help companies run their finances in a more stable and predictable way are seeing growth in their business.

In the latest development, Account IQThe Dublin-founded accounting technology company, which has been largely bootstrapped for almost two decades, has raised €60 million ($65 million) to seize the opportunity to build “the finance function of the future” for mid-sized businesses: a cloud-based, AI-powered automation service that helps accounting departments operate faster and more intelligently.

AccountsIQ itself was founded by accountants who saw an opportunity to build the tools they wanted to do their jobs, and as you’d expect from their background, they were financially cautious when it came to growth.

To date, with just 12.7 million euros in outside funding, AccountsIQ has about 1,000 customers, covering 10,000 “entities” (multiple operations within a single company) and 20,000 users, and the company’s CAGR has maintained a steady 30 percent annual growth over the past few years, Chief Operating Officer Darren Clunn said in an interview.

Tools to date include a range of digital accounting services (including accounts receivable and payable services, banking, business intelligence, forecasting and budgeting), digital tax services, reporting, a wide range of third-party services that can be integrated, and APIs for integrating AccountsIQ into other platforms, all in one place. SaaS Model Starting at around $250 per user per month.

The platform is hosted on Azure, and Cran said the company plans to build out customizations in-house as well as leverage Microsoft’s AI tools to add next-generation services that will include robotic process automation as well as AI-based capabilities to speed up users’ work.

“We are now ready to take AccountsIQ’s products and services to the next level,” AccountsIQ founder and CEO Tony Connolly said in a statement. “This investment marks the perfect inflection point for our offering, allowing us to leverage AI tools to deliver a service that is practical and easy to adopt for our user base, making the role of finance teams more flexible and valuable, less repetitive and more interesting.”

The funding is notable not only because it’s nearly five times what AccountsIQ has raised to date, but also because it comes at a time when startups as a whole are still struggling to raise capital like they did a few years ago, particularly in the startup’s home market.

a Recent Reports Startup funding in Ireland fell 48% year-on-year in the first quarter of this year, according to a survey by the Irish Venture Capital Association.

But while buzzy AI startups and the companies that enable them continue to dominate today’s funding headlines, a common refrain in bear markets is the staying power of solutions that help businesses operate better and more efficiently — so a run-of-the-mill accounting startup continues to garner attention.

“We recognize the potential for additional capital and expertise to accelerate AccountsIQ’s product development and are excited to partner with the company to scale AIQ to the next level,” Martin Waigas, founding partner at Axiom Equity, said in a statement.

For comparison, PennyLane, another accounting startup focused on the small business market, raised $40 million a few months ago at a valuation of more than $1 billion. It currently has about 120,000 users. (AccountsIQ and Axiom Equity, the lead investor in that round, did not disclose valuation figures.)

PennyLane is one potential competitor, but AccountsIQ would argue that PennyLane and companies like it are trying to displace some of the incumbents in the small business market, such as Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, etc. In contrast, Cran says AccountsIQ is positioning itself as the platform that companies can move to as they scale.


Source link

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Back to top button