Stacks secures £17m Series A to automate month‑end close using AI agents
This article covers Stacks, a fintech startup, which has raised £17m in a series A funding round led by Lightspeed, with participation from EQT Ventures, General Catalyst and S16VC. The funding will support development and expansion of its platform to automate core finance operations for large organisations, targeting enterprise finance teams and the Office of the CFO.
Stacks, a fintech startup, has raised £17 million in a series A funding round led by Lightspeed, with participation from EQT Ventures, General Catalyst and S16VC. The round underpins the company’s move to automate core finance operations for large organisations by linking fragmented systems and deploying AI agents to handle reconciliations, journal entries and month-end close — a problem that, if solved, can materially reduce costly manual work in corporate finance teams.
Why it matters
Enterprise finance remains stuck on spreadsheets, siloed ERPs and legacy systems that make month-end processes slow and error prone. Stacks says its platform creates a single financial view across those systems, enabling automation that aims to cut the routine work tied to accounting and the close. The business claims more than 30 enterprise customers onboarded in under a year and an annualised saving of over 100,000 staff hours — a measure that, if realised across larger organisations, would translate into faster reporting and lower operational cost.
The target market is substantial: Stacks is addressing the Office of the CFO software market and enterprise finance labour spend, which the company pegs as a multibillion-dollar opportunity. The deal signals continued investor interest in tools that automate back-office finance and bring AI into operational workflows.
Inside the product
Stacks builds a data layer that connects directly to ERPs, spreadsheets, data lakes and legacy systems to produce a consistent, company-wide financial dataset. On top of that foundation it runs deterministic machine-learning tooling and "agents" that execute and verify workflows at scale — reconciliations, journal entries and the month-end close.
A new feature, AI Flux Analysis, automates variance analysis and replaces spreadsheet-based commentary with account-level investigation. Flux surfaces variance drivers across transactions, pulls historical context across periods and generates draft explanations that finance teams can review and refine, rather than writing commentary manually.
Customers named in the announcement include Volt, Motorway, Cleo and Bloom & Wild. Volt is a European digital banking business; Motorway operates an online marketplace for used cars; Cleo provides consumer financial management services; and Bloom & Wild is a direct-to-consumer flower delivery company. These examples illustrate Stacks’ reach across different finance functions and sectors.
In the announcement, Andy Murray, Head of Finance at Cleo, said:
With Stacks, we’re saving a noticeable amount of time on the finance close, and as a result we can produce the management accounts faster each month.
Who are the investors?
Lightspeed led the series A, joined by EQT Ventures, General Catalyst and S16VC. The round follows Stacks’ stealth launch less than a year ago and is intended to fund product development and expansion of its financial intelligence features.
In the announcement, Alex Schmitt, Partner at Lightspeed, said:
Stacks is uniquely positioned to tackle some of the toughest challenges in enterprise finance. The team’s mix of technical and finance expertise from Uber and Plaid, along with the company’s remarkable traction, gives us strong conviction that they will lead the AI shift inside the Office of the CFO.
The investors backing Stacks combine US and European venture experience; their participation signals confidence in AI-native approaches to finance ops and in teams with both engineering and industry domain knowledge.
If you're researching potential backers in this space:
- Explore our list of fintech venture capital firms in the UK
- Browse our directory of fintech angel investors in the UK
Founder perspective
Stacks was founded in Amsterdam and is now headquartered in London. The team says it deliberately started with accounting and the close — the most manual, foundational finance workflows — to build an "AI-ready" data layer that can support downstream automation and analysis.
In the announcement, Albert Malikov, Founder & CEO, said:
We started with the most manual and foundational workflows in finance: accounting and the close. From day one, we focused on solving the core problem: fragmented data. By building an AI-ready data layer, we’re unlocking what’s needed to bring AI agents into operational finance, shifting CFO teams from process execution to higher-value analysis and decision-making.
The bigger picture
The round sits at the intersection of two trends: growing demand for automation inside finance teams and investor appetite for AI-first enterprise tooling. For UK and European businesses, tools that shorten the close and reduce reliance on spreadsheets are increasingly attractive as companies scale and reporting demands rise.
Stacks’ London base and pan-European founding story also reflect wider flows of talent and investment across the region’s fintech ecosystem. As startups and incumbents alike pursue AI-driven finance tooling, this funding round adds another data point that investors are willing to back businesses promising to replace repetitive finance work with automated, auditable processes.
They've invested in Stacks
Get to know these fintech investors
Click here for a full list of 7,526+ startup investors in the UK