AI startup Rillet hits $1bn valuation with $100mn raise

Rillet, an AI startup focused on rebuilding corporate accounting from the ground up, has secured $100mn in fresh funding at a $1bn valuation, officially joining the ranks of AI unicorns. The Series C round was led by ICONIQ, as the company exclusively shared with Fortune, with Nick Lichtenberg covering the deal. This marks Rillet’s third capital raise within just 14 months.

The investor list reads like a who’s who of AI backers. Existing shareholders Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, and Oak HC/FT all participated, according to Rillet. New names on the cap table include Bain Capital Ventures, Battery Ventures, FirstMark, Scale Venture Partners, and Creandum. With this round, total funding has now crossed the $200mn threshold, and ICONIQ general partner Seth Pierrepont is set to join the board.

Rethinking the general ledger

At its core, Rillet offers what it describes as an AI-native ERP, the enterprise resource planning software that manages a company’s financial operations. Founded in 2021 by Nicolas Kopp and Stelios Modes, the company made its public debut in August 2024, as reported by Tech Funding News. Modes, serving as chief technology officer, previously led the US operations of German neobank N26. Rillet reports ending its first year with 100 customers, followed by Series A and B rounds just ten weeks apart.

The pitch directly challenges the established players. Kopp contends that legacy systems from Oracle, SAP, Workday, Microsoft, and NetSuite are products of a pre-AI world, designed for manual data entry and verification. Rillet positions itself as “agent-first” instead. Its AI agents execute hundreds of operations simultaneously within a real-time general ledger, shifting accountants from hands-on data entry to oversight and review.

Kopp framed the transition in definitive terms. “For the last two decades, the ERP has been treated as a system of record, a place to store what already happened,” he said. “In the AI era, it has to become the operating layer for what happens next.” Finance agents, he added, “need to work inside the general ledger,” not merely pull data from it.

Rapid growth and a flagship client

The metrics behind this raise are striking. Rillet doubled its new annual recurring revenue in the three months leading up to the round. The company now counts more than 600 customers, with agent activity growing roughly 70 percent month over month, according to Kopp. Its client roster includes AI firms like Neuralink, Skild AI, and Mercor, alongside publicly traded companies. Notably, about 40 percent of customers now come from outside tech, spanning industries from waste recycling to film production, Kopp told Fortune.

One customer stands out in the sales narrative. Mercor leverages Rillet’s agents to manage a business scaling past $2bn in annual recurring revenue with a finance team of just three people, per the company. Pierrepont echoed this in the funding announcement, noting that customers are “multibillion-dollar businesses operating with finance teams a tenth the traditional size, closing their books continuously.”

Kopp was measured when addressing employment implications. “Our message is not that we’re coming after jobs. That’s just not correct,” he told Fortune, emphasizing that accounting expertise remains central to the product. He described the goal as freeing finance chiefs from spreadsheet drudgery. “CFOs really struggle day to day. They can’t see their families on weekends,” he said. Yet a more direct message sits alongside this one.

“We believe in lean, impactful finance teams,” Kopp wrote. He argues that controllers will shift from reconciliation work toward strategic thinking. The tension between fewer people and no job losses is left for observers to reconcile.

An old category accelerating

Kopp attributes the rapid pace to recent improvements in AI models. Accounting is “traditionally a very old, stodgy category,” he told Fortune, but tasks that once consumed a full day now take minutes. “Especially in the last six months, things started lighting on fire in a good way,” he said.

He also points to a shrinking accounting workforce as an opportunity. The US has 340,000 fewer accountants than five years ago, Kopp wrote, and AI agents can help fill that void. People are leaving the profession not because AI threatens their jobs, he argued, but because the work itself has become tedious.

Rillet has paired its growth push with institutional credibility. It launched an alliance with EY earlier this year and now partners with more than half of the Accounting Today top 20 CPA firms, along with KPMG and RSM, according to Tech Funding News. That trust factor is critical for a product asking large enterprises to entrust it with their financial records.

A crowded and cautious field

Rillet faces competition in this space. Campfire, founded in 2023, has raised roughly $100mn from Accel and Ribbit, positioning itself as a modern NetSuite, per Tech Funding News. Others like Puzzle and Digits focus on simpler bookkeeping for smaller businesses. Rillet, by contrast, targets more complex clients, including public companies.

The Information has highlighted a broader wave of “QuickBooks challengers” achieving billion-dollar valuations.

The market opportunity is substantial. The global ERP software market reached $92.6bn in 2025, growing at about 13 percent annually, Tech Funding News reported, citing Fortune Business Insights. Rillet’s raise represents a bet that AI can crack open a category long dominated by legacy giants.

Whether that bet pays off remains an open question. Finance departments tend to move cautiously, and it is unclear whether this startup wave will displace the incumbents or simply grow large enough to become them, Tech Funding News noted.

Rillet joins a string of fast-moving AI raises, from EliseAI to Higgsfield and Wispr, each promising to upend established workflows. It also arrives amid smaller enterprise-AI bets such as Prevalent AI. For now, Rillet has both the capital and the customer base to press its case.