Stacks Raises $23M to Automate Finance with AI

Jan de Vries · 2026-02-19

The enterprise finance world just got a major boost. Stacks, a UK-based AI platform built for accounting teams, has secured a hefty $23 million Series A funding round. This comes less than a year after their $12 million seed round, showing serious investor momentum. Led by Lightspeed, with participation from EQT Ventures, General Catalyst, and S16VC, this cash injection is all about fueling their new AI-powered reporting suite. The star of the show? Their new AI Flux Analysis tool, designed to make sense of complex financial shifts automatically. ### The Core Problem: Fragmented Data Founder and CEO Albert Malikov put it simply. "We started with the most manual and foundational workflows in finance: accounting and the close," he says. "From day one, we focused on solving the core problem: fragmented data." He's talking about the nightmare scenario for any finance team. Transaction details are scattered everywhere—across different ERPs, countless spreadsheets, data lakes, and old legacy systems. It forces teams into tedious manual work because the core platforms they use are slow, hard to connect, and frankly, not built for the AI age. The result? Finance professionals spend more time chasing down and reconciling numbers than actually analyzing them with real-time insight. Stacks is betting its entire platform on fixing that foundation first.  ### How Stacks Unlocks AI for Finance So, what did they build? Stacks developed a unique data layer that connects directly to a company's various finance systems. This creates a single, consistent financial view across the entire organization. It's the crucial first step. On top of that, they've built the deterministic machine-learning tools needed to make automation reliable at an enterprise scale. This allows their AI agents to take over key operational workflows. - **Reconciliations:** Matching transactions across systems. - **Journal Entries:** Automating standard postings. - **Flux Analysis:** Explaining variances in financials. - **The Month-End Close:** Streamlining the entire period-end process. ### Real-World Impact and Traction The proof is in the pudding. Stacks is already used by over 30 enterprise customers globally, including names like Volt, Motorway, Cleo, and Bloom & Wild. The reported benefits are substantial: They claim to reduce financial close cycles by up to 50% and save finance teams a collective 100,000 hours every year by automating those tedious tasks. Jack Nottage, Head of Finance at online used car marketplace Motorway, shared his experience. "The time savings are material. We were surprised just how quickly the value showed up," he said. His team reconciles thousands of payments weekly and cut time spent on reconciliation by 40 hours per month, just weeks after integrating Stacks. ### A Broader Trend in Enterprise AI This funding isn't happening in a vacuum. Recent reporting shows strong investor appetite for enterprise AI and data infrastructure well into 2025 and 2026. Stacks' raise is part of a bigger wave. Look at Stockholm's Agaton securing $9 million for AI that turns customer chats into revenue insights, or Germany's Blockbrain raising $19 million for AI agents that capture company knowledge. In the UK, SurrealDB announced a $21 million extension for its AI database infrastructure. Alex Schmitt, a Partner at lead investor Lightspeed, believes in the team's unique edge. "Stacks is uniquely positioned to tackle some of the toughest challenges in enterprise finance," he said. "The team's mix of technical and finance expertise from Uber and Plaid, along with the company's remarkable traction, gives us strong conviction." Founded in 2024 by veterans from Uber and Plaid, Stacks is on a mission to shift CFO teams from pure process execution to higher-value analysis and strategic decision-making. By building what they call an "AI-ready data layer," they're aiming to be the platform that finally brings reliable AI agents into the heart of operational finance. It's a big vision, and now they have another $23 million to make it a reality.