DualEntry said today it has raised $90 million in early-stage funding to try to bring artificial intelligence automation to one of the most entrenched enterprise software markets of all: financial management and accounting.
Today’s Series A round was led by high-profile venture capitalists Lightspeed Venture Partners and Khosla Ventures and saw the participation of Google LLC’s venture arm GV. It values New York-based DualEntry at $415 million.
Financial management and accounting is often known as “enterprise resource planning” or ERP, and it’s a software market that has long been dominated by legacy incumbents such as Oracle Corp. with its NetSuite platform, Sage Group Plc and Acumatica Inc. These platforms sit at the heart of many enterprises’ financial systems, handling transactions, tracking their financial performance and ensuring compliance with audit regulations. Though they’re comprehensive and reliable, such systems can also be tricky to implement, expensive to maintain and difficult to automate.
DualEntry, officially known as Entry Inc., believes that AI provides an alternative foundation for ERP that can redesign the entire software category for a new era of automation. The company points out that traditional ERP systems were originally designed and developed during the pre-cloud era, and says this makes them resistant to AI-enabled acceleration. Even just implementing such platforms can take many months and requires companies to hire numerous expensive consultants to get them working properly.
The startup’s software provides a wide range of financial capabilities, including accounts receivable, accounts payable, general ledger, live bank connections and financial planning and analysis. These are combined with integrated AI automations to accelerate tasks including transaction processing and matching, reconciliation, inter-company allocations and anomaly detection. By making AI a core feature of its platform, instead of trying to layer it on top like legacy ERP vendors do, DualEntry says it can dramatically reduce the amount of repetitive work finance teams need to do.
Beyond automation, the startup is also trying to dramatically simplify ERP implementation. DualEntry co-founder and Chief Executive Santiago Nestares recalled his own personal experience of trying to migrate his last startup from a simple accounting platform to an ERP system, saying the initial attempt failed miserably.
“Once it was finally up and running, it was clunky, slow and impossible to customize,” he said. The experience inspired him to create an alternative ERP system that businesses could get up and running in as little as 24 hours.
DualEntry claims it can do this with its “NextDay Migration” tool, which uses AI mapping techniques to transfer a company’s historical financial data from older accounting systems to its platform within a day. Normally, migrating to an ERP system would require hiring expert consultants and take many months to complete.
This rapid implementation is a key aspect of DualEntry’s sales proposition: It’s focused on midmarket companies that have outgrown accounting systems such as QuickBooks, but are wary of trying to migrate their financial records to a traditional ERP platform. To reassure prospective customers, DualEntry’s software integrates with more than 13,000 banks and various third-party systems spanning human resources, customer relationship management and accounts payable. By doing this, it says, it can pull siloed data into a single source of truth, enabling teams to abandon spreadsheets and fragmented tools and work with real-time dashboards and visualizations.
Nestares said the funding from today’s round will be used to expand the company’s roughly 40-person team, accelerate product development and expand its platform internationally.
Lightspeed Venture Partners’ Ravi Mhatre said DualEntry has enormous potential to disrupt the $500 billion ERP market, because there are thousands of businesses that have been “trapped” with legacy systems that aren’t designed for the new AI-driven economy. “DualEntry has fundamentally reimagined ERP from the ground up for the AI age, and strong early adoption validates our thesis that the market is ready for this transformation,” he said.
Image: DualEntry
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