Light, the creator of a fully automated general ledger for multinationals, has come out of stealth today with a €12.1 million seed round to scale the first AI-powered general ledger for automating global company finances.
The round was led by European VC Atomico, with participation from Entrée Capital, Cherry Ventures and Seedcamp. In addition, a number of notable angels also joined the round including Professional Athlete Mario Götze. As part of this round, Atomico Partner Andreas Helbig will join Light’s board. Light has built their product in close collaboration with advisors who consist of former product leaders, chief architects and CXOs from Workday, SAP, Oracle and Microsoft Dynamics.
Since it was created in the 1980s, ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software has become widely adopted and sits underneath most businesses’ operations. It’s a market now valued at $81.5 billion and is projected to grow to $240 billion by 2032. Despite the size of the opportunity, the current products on offer are stagnant. The incumbent software solutions were designed for businesses of thirty years ago and do not meet the expectations of today’s modern, global-first companies. This issue is particularly acute for multinationals, who often deal with more complex and fragmented reporting and governance requirements.
Jonathan Sanders, Light co-founder, said: “Having not just worked at a unicorn, but started one myself, I am acutely familiar with how poor legacy accounting systems are, and how much that can impact your business. They’re expensive, very slow, and require too many add-ons to be useful on a standalone basis. With Light, our goal is to help companies understand their finances more accurately and quickly by integrating a ledger with a strong application layer, helping them achieve faster growth, stronger operations, and greater resilience.”
The general ledger — a company’s source of truth for financial transactions — is the hardest problem for ERP software to solve. Ensuring data is correctly recorded is often a month-long process, given varying local accounting practices. Getting these records wrong, even by accident, can lead to potential issues with VAT returns, government audits and late annual closing. Even modern solutions fall short for multinationals needing robust general ledger capabilities, as they only ever cover a single entity.
Light’s mission is therefore to be the first automated ledger for global companies. It has re-imagined the ERP concept from the ground up to deliver a financial suite that can dramatically help modern multinationals, with a general ledger that can run all of a company’s global transactions seamlessly.
Its platform unifies accounting, tax, payments and reporting across multiple countries and currencies. Light’s AI is able to clean transactional data quickly and precisely, and ensures it is correctly recorded in the ledger, saving the finance team from having to sift through individual line-items manually and dramatically reducing the month-end closing drag. Its AI also acts like a teammate — with a Slackbot that answers not just straightforward factual questions, but key strategic business questions as well.
These capabilities, combined with Light’s high-performance infrastructure and slick, intuitive interface, create a package that is cheaper, faster, and more accurate than legacy financial ERP software.
“Considering how crucial accounting is to a company’s basic functioning, it’s surprising that until Light, all the technological solutions were essentially developed in the ‘90s and have been left untouched ever since,” Andreas Helbig, Partner at Atomico, commented. “Light’s made not just a brilliant and much-needed product, but has also made excellent progress in its very early stages — already working with multinational SMEs who operate across Europe and the US. I’m really pleased that they’ve chosen to partner with us to accelerate their growth and capture this hugely underserved market.”
