Berlin Startup Raises $19M to Replace Your Tax Team with AI

Jan de Vries · 2026-09-16

What if you could hand off your accounting, tax filings, and payroll to AI agents—and never worry about compliance again? That's exactly what a Berlin-based startup is building, and investors just bet big on it. Integral, founded in 2024 by Lukas Zörner and Anil Can Baykal, just closed a €18 million Series A round—that's about $19.5 million. The round was co-led by Mosaic Ventures and Reid Hoffman, with existing backers Cherry Ventures, General Catalyst, and Puzzle Ventures joining in. Not bad for a company that's less than two years old and has already raised over $32 million total. ### Why Investors Are Betting on AI-Powered Accounting The pitch is simple: small and medium businesses are drowning in compliance work. Labor shortages in accounting and tax are getting worse, not better. Integral's answer? Let AI agents do the heavy lifting, while licensed professionals review and sign off on everything. "With AI, it's possible to rebuild industries from the ground up—not just sell better software," said Chandar Lal, Partner at Mosaic Ventures. "In accounting, tax and payroll, the need is obvious as labour shortages are only getting worse." That's the core insight. It's not about building another tool for accountants. It's about rebuilding the firm itself. ### How It Actually Works Integral combines AI engineers with licensed tax professionals. The AI agents handle the grunt work: reconciling invoices and bank transactions, creating account postings, preparing payroll runs, and even drafting tax filings. Then a human expert reviews and signs every single filing. Here's the kicker: every review feeds back into the platform, so the automation gets smarter with each client. For more than half of their clients, agents now prepare the books end-to-end—cutting the average monthly accounting turnaround from weeks to hours. "Software doesn't file your business's taxes. It doesn't run your payroll and it doesn't sign your annual accounts. A licensed professional does, and there are fewer of them every year," said Zörner, co-founder and CEO. "So instead of building yet another tool for professionals, we built the firm itself." ### The Results Are Already Showing Integral Tax, an independent licensed firm affiliated with the startup, runs entirely on the platform. Since the beginning of the year, its professionals have doubled the number of clients each of them can serve. That's the promise of AI in professional services: amplify humans, don't replace them. The company is also a recognized public audit firm under German law, subject to oversight by the Chamber of Public Accountants. They emphasize GDPR compliance and store all client data exclusively in European data centers. ### What This Means for the Future of Professional Services This funding round isn't just about one startup. It's a signal that AI-native services—where the firm itself is rebuilt around AI—could be the winning model for regulated industries. As Reid Hoffman put it in his investment thesis, the real promise of AI is amplifying what people can do. Integral is proving that even in one of the most trust-dependent industries, AI can multiply the reach of licensed experts. For small businesses, that could mean access to financial expertise once reserved for large corporations. And for the accounting industry, it's a wake-up call: adapt or get left behind. With this fresh capital, Integral plans to push automation even deeper across all workflows. If they succeed, the days of waiting weeks for your books to close might soon be a distant memory.