AI is attracting attention for all kinds of future technologies, from humanoid robots to autonomous warships. However, in a very traditional industry, there is a quieter boom. accounting. VCs are excited by the prospect of using AI on funding companies such as last year’s figures and Kick to automate expensive human labor.
The latest startup to ride this wave is Quanta, selling AI-powered accounting platforms to software companies and raising a $4.7 million seed round led by Accel. Other investors include Basecase, Comma Capital and San Francisco Angel investor Elad Gil.
Quanta traces its origins to the time of founder Helen Hastings as a software engineer at Buy Now. Getting excellent financial data is very manual, with reports published only once a month.
“We wanted to build something from the ground up that would help our financial teams and business leaders become more efficient,” Hastings told TechCrunch.
Therefore, Quanta’s platform creates data from existing Fintech tools such as Brex, Mercury, and Stripe, automatically creating books and real-time reports.
This is a vision that has stumbled upon other startups like the failing bench that have attempted to automate some of the expensive human bookkeepers (600 strengths) with AI. But Hastings says Quanta will avoid this challenge by building an AI-first product before hiring many bookkeepers. So of course, the automated system was only the first to accept customers who could do all the accounting.
Funding is also a personal milestone for Hastings, as a female founder of a male-dominated space. According to Pitchbook Data, the percentage of funds sent to women-only founding companies like Quanta was only 2% in 2024. Hastings says a university instructor once said she never imagined that she would become the founder. But such moments make her even more cheerful.
With the funding, Hastings says Quanta plans to move beyond the current early-stage software company niche to a larger company that includes companies with multiple corporate entities. Hastings says he’s excited that the larger organizations “hope more” “beyond what the incumbents were able to handle.”
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