Bokio, the Swedish based startup which utilises artificial intelligence to simplify bookkeeping for small businesses, sole traders, and freelancers, has raised €4 million.
Led by Creandum (early backers of Spotify), with participation from European financial group Svea, and an individual investment from Chris Adelsbach, Managing Director of Techstars, the funding will enable Bokio to scale its business in the UK where it launched earlier in 2019, and to further develop its AI-based bookkeeping tool with the implementation of more add-on services.
Bokio acts as a digital assistant, providing support for a wide range of administrative tasks including invoicing, employee expenses, reporting and VAT returns. Its user-friendly interface is designed so that first-time business owners can make use of the software without requiring any previous experience in accounting.
Accounting tasks are often a daunting prospect for many business owners due to their time-consuming, perplexing and often costly nature. Archaic legacy bookkeeping processes significantly compromise the productivity and overall financial stability of many small businesses. According to 2018 research from the Federation of Small Businesses, the average UK small business spends the equivalent of almost three working weeks and £5,000 each year navigating complex tax reporting processes.
Bokio was founded in Gothenburg, Sweden, in 2015 by its CEO Viktor Stensson and CTO Mikael Eliasson, after Viktor helped Mikael, who was a freelance engineer at the time, fulfil various accounting tasks that he was struggling with. Together, they realised how intricate the tax filing system was and both saw a substantial opportunity to modernise the accounting industry by automating the bookkeeping process.
Viktor Stensson, Bokio CEO and co-founder, comments: “We are excited to continue our partnership with Creandum, who share a mutual passion for serving the ever-growing SME community. Accountancy continues to be an expensive and inaccessible task for many small businesses and freelancers, and we are committed to democratising it by providing a simple, yet powerful, free-to-use service, with genuinely useful add-on services providing users with even more control and support. After achieving market dominance in our native Sweden, we are now focused on scaling our business up in the UK, where we have already seen a huge demand for our tool since launching earlier in 2019.”
Johan Brenner, at Creandum, comments: “We are proud to continue our journey as an investor in Bokio with this new injection of funding. Viktor, Mikael and the team have taken the company to great heights in Sweden and we are looking forward to seeing the company expand and develop its product across the UK and beyond. At Creandum, we are always looking to support future category leaders and we believe Bokio can become a global name in the accounting software space.“
