Zalos Secures $3.6M for Finance Workflow Automation
▼ Summary
– Zalos is a YC startup that creates computer agents by training them on screen recordings of finance workflows, eliminating the need for API integrations.
– It addresses the problem of disconnected finance software (ERPs, CRMs, spreadsheets) where manual data handling is common due to poor API connectivity.
– The company raised $3.6 million in a round led by 14 Peaks, with participation from Cohen Circle, 20VC, and notable finance industry angels.
– Its agents operate existing software directly via the user interface, replicating recorded tasks with full audit logs and SOC 2 certification.
– The founders are a former Agicap GM and a former Apple Pay engineer, who focus on providing finance-specific accuracy rather than general-purpose agents.
A new approach to enterprise finance automation is emerging, one that bypasses the complex and often impossible task of API integration. Zalos, a startup from Y Combinator’s Fall 2025 cohort, has secured $3.6 million in funding to advance its vision. The company’s platform transforms simple screen recordings of manual processes into functional computer agents, enabling finance teams to automate workflows directly within their existing, disparate software stacks without writing a single line of integration code.
The fundamental challenge for modern finance departments is a fragmented technology landscape. Teams are forced to operate across a patchwork of ERPs, CRMs, banking portals, and spreadsheets, systems that were never designed to communicate seamlessly. When APIs are unavailable or inadequate, the burden of integration falls on human analysts. They manually download, reformat, and re-upload data, a tedious and error-prone process that consumes valuable time on tasks ripe for automation.
Zalos, co-headquartered in San Francisco and London, proposes a solution that works with this reality instead of fighting it. The startup’s thesis is that the answer isn’t another monolithic ERP implementation but an intelligent layer that operates existing tools exactly as a human would. This seed round was led by Swiss venture firm 14 Peaks, with participation from Cohen Circle and 20VC. The investor group includes notable angels with deep domain expertise, such as FedEx CFO Mike Lenz and Indeed founder Paul Forster, signaling strong confidence in the specialized problem Zalos is solving.
The technical methodology is strikingly straightforward. A finance professional simply records their screen while completing a routine process, whether it’s running a billing cycle in NetSuite, performing a reconciliation in SAP, or executing a month-end close in Sage. The Zalos platform uses this recording to train a software agent that can then replicate the entire sequence autonomously. The agent logs into applications, navigates interfaces, inputs data, and manages two-factor authentication, all without any modification to the underlying software. Every action is documented in a detailed, auditable log, and the platform is SOC 2 Part II certified, addressing critical compliance and security concerns for financial data.
This focus on bypassing APIs is a core commercial insight. Many finance automation projects fail because they depend on integrations that are either non-existent, insufficiently robust, or require prohibitively long development cycles. Zalos eliminates that dependency entirely.
The founders converged on this idea from complementary backgrounds. CEO William Fairbairn previously served as UK General Manager at Agicap, a CFO software company, where countless conversations with finance leaders revealed a universal pain point: ERP implementation projects are notoriously slow, costly, and high-risk. CTO Hung Hoang brought technical depth from a five-year tenure at Apple, where he worked on Apple Pay and AI initiatives, followed by research into agentic AI at a specialized lab. They partnered at Y Combinator to launch Zalos in late 2025.
The company is entering a competitive space where giants like OpenAI and Anthropic are developing general-purpose agents. Zalos is betting on domain-specific automation, arguing that finance operations demand extreme accuracy, comprehensive audit trails, and nuanced skills like advanced Excel manipulation and ERP navigation that broader tools cannot yet guarantee. Its initial customers are mid-market and enterprise finance teams, and the new capital will fuel expansion into support for additional ERP systems and on-premise software environments.
(Source: The Next Web)