What’s being bought: AI that takes work out of the CFO office
Enterprise finance teams pay for Stacks to remove the manual, repetitive work that slows month-end close and distorts reporting confidence. The product targets the real bottleneck in many finance organisations: fragmented data, reconciliations that live in spreadsheets, and high-effort journal entry and variance analysis processes that consume senior time.
Deal news
Stacks, a UK-based financial services software company, has raised EUR 21.85 million (reported as $23 million) in Series A funding. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from EQT Ventures, General Catalyst, and S16VC.
The financing comes less than a year after a $12 million seed round led by General Catalyst, underscoring rapid investor conviction in AI-native tooling for core finance workflows.
Product and GTM: where agentic AI meets enterprise controls
Stacks positions itself as an AI-powered platform that automates manual enterprise finance workflows using agentic AI. The company highlights use cases that sit at the heart of controllership operations:
- Reconciliations
- Journal entries
- Variance analysis
- Month-end close
This is a category where “automation” only sticks if it respects auditability and existing systems of record. The adoption wedge is typically narrow but valuable: start with one painful workflow (for example reconciliations or a close step that repeatedly slips), prove reliability, then expand across adjacent tasks.
Stacks says it serves over 30 enterprise clients globally and estimates it has saved 100,000 hours of finance work. Early clients have reported immediate ROI, including faster reporting cycles from days to minutes, and growing usage beyond finance into operational workflows.
Why this round is a with-trend signal
The investor lineup and pace of funding reflect a broader, accelerating pattern in enterprise software: AI is moving from “assistive” features to systems that complete work end-to-end.
Finance is particularly primed for this shift because:
- The workflows are repetitive and rules-based, but still high stakes. Close tasks are often deterministic, yet errors are costly.
- Data is distributed. Teams reconcile across ERPs, billing tools, bank feeds, and operational systems, creating a persistent “last mile” problem.
- The value is measurable. Time-to-close, number of adjustments, and reporting latency are metrics buyers track, making ROI easier to evidence.
At the same time, the bar for reliability is higher than in many other back-office domains. That is why traction with enterprise clients is meaningful: it suggests Stacks is getting through procurement and governance hurdles that can slow AI deployments.
Team signal: finance and product DNA
Stacks’ founding team brings a mix of technical and finance experience from Uber and Plaid, with Albert Malikov as founder and CEO focused on solving core enterprise finance problems.
Lightspeed partner Alex Schmitt has pointed to the team’s expertise and traction as reasons to back Stacks’ push into the CFO office. In practical terms, that combination matters because successful implementations require both:
- Deep understanding of how finance teams actually run close and controls
- Product and engineering capability to integrate with existing stacks and deliver consistent outputs
Likely focus areas post-funding (inference)
Stacks has not detailed a use-of-proceeds plan in the announcement. Based on typical Series A execution in this category, likely priorities include expanding enterprise sales capacity, deepening integrations into common finance systems, and investing in product hardening around controls, audit trails, and deployment tooling.
What this enables
- Faster expansion from single-workflow wins into broader close and reporting coverage
- More enterprise-grade integrations to reduce implementation friction
- Higher customer retention through deeper embed in core finance processes
What to watch
- Proof that “days to minutes” reporting holds up across complex, multi-entity environments
- How Stacks handles governance: auditability, permissions, exception handling, and control frameworks
- Whether it can scale beyond early adopters to more conservative finance organisations
- Competitive response as incumbents and adjacent finance tooling vendors push agentic automation into close