Stacks raises USD $23m to automate enterprise finance

Stacks has raised USD $23 million in a Series A round led by Lightspeed, as the London-based fintech expands its automation tools for finance teams.

EQT Ventures, General Catalyst and S16VC also participated, increasing their stakes after backing an earlier financing round.

Stacks sells software to enterprise finance teams, focusing on account reconciliations, journal entries and month-end close. Its tools aim to cut reconciliation work from days to minutes.

Over the past 12 months, Stacks has onboarded 30 enterprise clients and says it has saved them 100,000 hours of reconciliation time. Customers include Pleo, Cleo, Motorway and Bloom & Wild.

The funding comes alongside the launch of AI Flux Analysis, which targets reporting tasks often handled in spreadsheets, including variance analysis and narrative commentary.

Automation focus

Stacks is betting that finance will be the next major enterprise function to adopt AI-driven workflows. It points to the labour intensity of finance operations in larger organisations and the manual work required to reconcile data across systems.

Many finance departments still run processes across multiple tools. Transaction details can sit in enterprise resource planning software, spreadsheets, data warehouses and legacy applications, leaving teams to stitch together reports and explanations from different sources.

The platform is built around a data layer that connects to finance systems to create a consolidated financial view. It also uses deterministic machine-learning tooling designed to keep automation consistent across repetitive operational tasks.

On that foundation, Stacks uses agents to run workflows across reconciliations, journal entries and parts of the month-end close.

"Stacks is uniquely positioned to tackle some of the toughest challenges in enterprise finance," said Alex Schmitt, Partner at Lightspeed.

Customer results

Motorway, an online used car marketplace, said it reduced the time spent on reconciliation after connecting Stacks to its systems.

"The time savings are material. We were surprised just how quickly the value showed up," said Jack Nottage, Head of Finance at Motorway.

Cleo, which describes itself as an AI-native personal finance assistant, also reported shorter processing times for journals and reporting.

"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," said Andy Murray, Head of Finance at Cleo.

Nivoda, a jewellery trading platform, said Stacks cut the length of its monthly close and increased automation in reconciliations.

"We slashed our monthly close time by eight days," said JP, Global Head of Accounting at Nivoda.

Flux analysis

AI Flux Analysis automates variance analysis and generates account-level explanations. The system identifies drivers of change across transactions and adds historical context across periods.

Finance teams can review and refine the generated explanations. The product also includes an executive-summary format for finance leaders, positioned as the first layer of a broader intelligence suite.

The launch signals a push beyond close automation into reporting and analysis, a crowded area where teams often rely on a mix of accounting tools, business intelligence products and spreadsheets. In many organisations, narrative commentary remains a manual activity outside core systems.

Market context

Stacks is targeting software spending within the Office of the CFO, as well as the labour costs of running finance operations. In close and reconciliation, it points to BlackLine, HighRadius and OneStream as incumbent providers.

Founded in Amsterdam and headquartered in London, Stacks operates in both cities and serves customers across the UK, Europe and the US. The company says former leaders from Uber and Plaid are among its founders and early team members.

"We started with the most manual and foundational workflows in finance: accounting and the close," said Albert Malikov, Founder and CEO of Stacks.