Founders Associate

Lightspeed leads $23M investment in AI startup for accounting departments Stacks. The Series A in Stacks also includes returning investors EQT Ventures, General Catalyst, and S16VC. A London-headquartered AI startup targeting accountancy departments, set up by a former Uber and Plaid executive, has raised $23 million in a Series A round, led by new investor Lightspeed. The Series A in Stacks also includes returning investors EQT Ventures, General Catalyst, and S16VC. The new round follows 12 months after its $12m seed round. It has raised $35m in total. Stacks, founded in Amsterdam but headquartered in London, is an AI platform for enterprise accounting teams. Its tech is remedying the challenge of scattered data in enterprise finance. It says that transaction-level detail is scattered across ERPs, spreadsheets, data lakes, and legacy systems, forcing teams into manual workarounds because core platforms are slow, difficult to integrate, and not built for AI. Stacks says it has built a data layer that connects directly to finance systems and creates a single, consistent financial view across them. It says it has also built machine-learning tooling required to make automation reliable at enterprise scale and is deploying agents that automate workflows across the finance stack. Its 30 clients include the publisher Future and audio firm Epidemic Sound. Stacks was set up by CEO Albert Malikov, who, before founding Stacks, held product leadership roles at Uber and Plaid, where he worked on scaling Plaid's European business. Alex Schmitt, partner at Lightspeed, said: "Stacks is uniquely positioned to tackle some of the toughest challenges in enterprise finance. The team's mix of technical and finance expertise from Uber and Plaid, along with the company's remarkable traction, gives us strong conviction that they will lead the AI shift inside the Office of the CFO."

Enterprise finance platform Stacks raises €19 million to streamline reporting and month-end workflows. February 19, 2026 Stacks, a British agentic platform for enterprise finance, has raised a €19 million ($23 million) Series A - introducing their new reporting and analysis suite, at the core of which sits their new offering; AI Flux Analysis. The round was led by Lightspeed, with EQT Ventures, General Catalyst, and S16VC doubling down. The round comes less than a year after Stacks' €10 million ($12 million) seed financing, as covered by EU-Startups. "We started with the most manual and foundational workflows in finance: accounting and the close," says Albert Malikov, Founder and CEO of Stacks. "From day one, we focused on solving the core problem: fragmented data. By building an AI-ready data layer, we're unlocking what's needed to bring AI agents into operational finance, shifting CFO teams from process execution to higher-value analysis and decision-making." Recent EU-Startups reporting shows continued investor appetite for enterprise AI and adjacent data infrastructure across 2025 and early 2026. Stockholm-based Agaton secured €8.4 million in Seed funding to scale its agentic AI platform focused on converting customer conversations into revenue insights, while Germany's Blockbrain raised €17.5 million in a Series A round to advance enterprise-grade AI agents that capture and operationalise organisational knowledge. In the UK, London-based SurrealDB announced a €19 million Series A extension to scale its multi-model database infrastructure for AI applications, marking additional British activity in AI-focused enterprise software. Together, these adjacent rounds amount to approximately €44.9 million in disclosed funding, rising to roughly €63.9 million when including Stacks' €19 million Series A. Collectively, the funding reflects sustained capital flowing into platforms that address fragmented data, enterprise automation and AI deployment within core business functions, situating Stacks' raise within a broader 2025-2026 enterprise AI investment cycle. "Stacks is uniquely positioned to tackle some of the toughest challenges in enterprise finance," adds Alex Schmitt, Partner at Lightspeed. "The team's mix of technical and finance expertise from Uber and Plaid, along with the company's remarkable traction, gives us strong conviction that they will lead the AI shift inside the Office of the CFO." Founded in 2024 by former leaders from Uber and Plaid, Stacks is an AI platform for enterprise accounting teams. The company uses AI agents to automate operational finance workflows, including reconciliations, journal entries, flux analysis, and the month-end close. Stacks is used by more than 30 enterprise customers globally, including Volt, Motorway, Cleo and Bloom & Wild, and reportedly reduces close cycles by as much as 50% and saves finance teams over 100,000 hours annually by automating reconciliations, journal entries, and the month-end close. "The time savings are material. We were surprised just how quickly the value showed up," says Jack Nottage, Head of Finance at Motorway, the online used car marketplace, whose finance team reconciles several thousands of payments weekly and was able to cut time spent handling reconciliation by 40 hours per month within weeks of integrating with Stacks. The company believes that fragmented data remains one of the biggest structural barriers in enterprise finance. Transaction-level detail is scattered across ERPs, spreadsheets, data lakes, and legacy systems, forcing teams into manual workarounds because core platforms are slow, difficult to integrate, and not built for AI. As a result, finance teams spend more time reconciling numbers than operating with real-time visibility. Stacks built its platform by solving this foundation first. The company developed a data layer that connects directly to finance systems and creates a single, consistent financial view across them. It has also built deterministic machine-learning tooling required to make automation reliable at enterprise scale. On top of that foundation, Stacks has deployed agents that automate operational workflows across the finance stack. "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, the AI-native personal finance assistant, who onboarded with Stacks to improve the team's critical workflows. Cleo now reports 80% faster journal entry processing and the ability to pull data between systems to produce enhanced financial reports within seconds. The company today introduced a new reporting and analysis suite aimed at moving finance teams beyond manual reporting and toward automated business explanation. At the centre of the launch is AI Flux Analysis, a product that automates variance analysis and replaces spreadsheet-based commentary with explainable, account-level investigation. Flux identifies variance drivers across transactions, pulls historical context across periods, and generates explanations that finance teams can review and refine. Stack is also introducing a leadership-ready executive summary, which represents the first layer of a broader intelligence suite for enterprise finance. "We slashed our monthly close time by eight days," said JP, Global Head of Accounting at global jewelry trading platform, Nivoda. "Journal postings went from days to minutes, and we automated 95% of reconciliations."

Stacks, a London-based provider of an agentic platform for enterprise finance, has raised $23 million in Series A funding led by Lightspeed. EQT Ventures, General Catalyst and S16VC participated in the round, which follows a $12 million seed round led by General Catalyst. Founded by CEO Albert Malikov in Amsterdam, Stacks uses AI agents to automate operational finance workflows including reconciliations, journal entries, flux analysis and month-end close. The company recently launched AI Flux Analysis, which automates variance analysis and generates explainable, account-level investigations. Stacks serves over 30 enterprise customers globally, including Epidemic Sound, Datavant, Future PLC and Nivoda, helping teams reduce close cycles by up to 50%. The funds will support operational expansion and development efforts.