AI-native accounting startup Quanta Financial raises $4.7M to automate bookkeeping in real time

Quanta Financial Inc. is planning to turbocharge the accounting industry with artificial intelligence after closing on a $4.7 million seed funding round today.

The round was led by Accel Partners and saw participation from BaseCase, Comma Capital, Designer Fund, Operator Collective and renowned San Francisco-based investor Elad Gil, and came as the startup announced its flagship product hit general availability.

The company is trying to eliminate the most repetitive tasks in accounting, to the extent that human accountants will only have to worry about the most creative aspects of their work.

To that end, it has built an “AI-native” proprietary general ledger that’s supported by highly scalable and granular subledgers that can quickly be integrated with a company’s traditional financial and accounting tools, such as Brex, Mercury and Stripe. Once that’s done, Quanta’s platform will quickly vacuum up all of that financial data, and use it to generate accounting books and real-time reports.

Quanta says this AI-powered approach eliminates much of the pain and hassle of traditional accounting tools. It can perform complex tasks that normally take days if not weeks in a matter of minutes. In this way, it “100x’s” professional accounting teams, freeing them up to focus on much higher value work, the startup claims.

The company was founded by its Chief Executive Officer Helen Hastings (pictured, center), who previously worked as an engineer at the buy now, pay later payments company Affirm Holdings Inc. There, she witnessed firsthand how incredibly dated today’s financial accounting tools are.

“During my time [at Affirm]… I built multiple financial systems of record, including its in-house accounting system, as the company scaled from 100 to 2,500 employees,” Hastings explained. “I saw firsthand how accounting software has lagged. The manual work required to produce data has resulted in a once-per-month reporting cadence that holds businesses back.”

Outdated accounting systems provide a stark contrast with most other enterprise-focused software platforms. While the customer relationship management, human capital management and data analytics industries have all embraced AI-powered automation, accounting software has so far proven resistant to this trend.

As a result, many companies continue to battle with prolonged accounting close cycles, manual workflows, delaying access to critical financial reports. That means business leaders are often left to make decisions based on incomplete data.

This is what Quanta wants to change, using AI to ensure that every customer’s books reflect the most up-to-date information. The startup says its AI native accounting platform integrates with customer’s existing banking systems and financial tools to provide real-time updates to their books.

It also uses an automated validation system to ensure those auto-populated accounting entities are accurate and compliant with each customer’s policies. This system is supported by more than 40 daily checks and reconciliations to ensure balances match with those in the source financial tools.

Accounting processes are further enhanced by Quanta’s integration with Stripe and its contract ingestion system, which allows it to automate revenue recognition across multiple sources. There’s also an accrual system that automates the creation of schedules for pre-paid and fixed assets. In addition, each customer gets access to one of Quanta’s human financial experts via Slack, who can provide dedicated strategic and creative guidance.

Hastings said Quanta’s platform means accountants will only need to perform higher level, creative work, such as defining their companies’ business models, setting appropriate policies and asking the right questions to drive revenue growth and profits.

Quanta isn’t the only company trying to simplify accounting and bookkeeping processes with AI. It faces competition from other startups, such as Basis, Docyt AI Inc. and Numeric, as well as industry stalwarts like Thomson Reuters Corp., which recently bought an AI-powered bookkeeping startup called Materia Inc. There are others, too, such as Aiwyn Inc. and Finaloop Inc., though theyre focused on specific niches within accounting, such as revenue management and e-commerce.

In addition, Quanta will no doubt be aware of the dismal failure of another accounting software startup, Bench Accounting Inc., which almost went out of business after trying and failing to introduce AI smarts to assist its hundreds-strong staff of human bookkeepers. A report by TechCrunch reveals that Bench’s AI tools didn’t work as expected, creating numerous inaccuracies in its customer’s books, leading to significant delays.

Just before Christmas, the company stunned its customers when it announced it would be shutting down its platform immediately, not even giving them the opportunity to migrate their accounting data to somewhere else. Fortunately for its customers, it later came back online following a rapid sale to Employer.com Inc.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Hastings said Quanta will avoid the problems faced by Bench with its automated validation tools and by building its AI capabilities first, before enhancing them with human bookkeepers later.

Whether that approach works remains to be seen, but Quanta has managed to convince a number of high-profile investors, including Amit Kumar of Accel. He said breakthroughs in AI and the consolidation of financial data in the cloud have created some unique opportunities for innovation, and he believes Quanta is ready to seize on them.

“Helen and the Quanta team are building a system that represents a radical departure from the status quo, delivering a new model of real-time delivery and unparalleled accuracy,” he said.

Images: Quanta