Vic.ai, an AI-powered accounting automation platform, raises $50M

Vic.ai, a startup growing software program to automate accounting and monetary processes, right this moment introduced that it closed a $50 million sequence B financing spherical with participation from GGV Capital, Cowboy Ventures, and Costanoa Ventures. Pivoting away from its preliminary deal with accounting professionals, Vic says it’ll use the capital to increase its current enterprise providing in addition to construct out its monetary intelligence engine.

Specialists imagine that automation holds monumental potential within the accounting business. Based on an Ernst & Younger survey of finance leaders, 53{69439eabc38bbe67fb47fc503d1b0f790fcef507f9cafca8a4ef4fbfe163a7c5} imagine that greater than half of finance duties at the moment dealt with by folks might be carried out by AI over the following three years. In a separate examine carried out by cloud accounting software program firm Sage, 45{69439eabc38bbe67fb47fc503d1b0f790fcef507f9cafca8a4ef4fbfe163a7c5} of licensed public accountants (CPAs) mentioned that they intend to automate duties together with knowledge entry and number-crunching, whereas 40{69439eabc38bbe67fb47fc503d1b0f790fcef507f9cafca8a4ef4fbfe163a7c5} mentioned they plan to automate invoicing and accounts payable processes and workflows.

Vic, which was based in 2017 by Norwegian entrepreneurs Alexander Hagerup and Kristoffer Roil, combines the 2 pillars of (1) bill processing and (2) optimizing enterprise selections whereas making use of reasoning to the information that’s processed. The platform delivers options just like the AI-powered Autopilot, which selects invoices and bills that meet a sure confidence threshold and automates them in order that they’re instantly despatched to approvers with out requiring human evaluate. One other function, Autonomous Approval Flows, determines the variety of steps in an bill approval course of and robotically decides which worker must evaluate every step.

“Regardless of the business, each firm wants accounting, which is inheritably tedious and time-consuming. Accounting duties have all the time been managed by utilizing legacy programs which might be based mostly on varied predefined guidelines and templates, like Excel,” CEO Hagerup advised VentureBeat by way of electronic mail. “Kris and I needed to infuse intelligence into accounting by way of an AI resolution that may cause like people and make accounting selections in order that workers can deal with extra high-value actions … At present, Vic delivers absolutely autonomous AI programs that make finance and accounting groups extra environment friendly, correct, and clever.”

AI beneath the hood

Hagerup and Roil constructed the primary iteration of Vic by coaching the platform’s AI on historic accounting knowledge and processes from greater than 30,000 firms. The coaching dataset contained over 200 million accounting paperwork and corresponding journal entries, amounting to 300 million data, which had been reviewed by accountants at consultancy corporations together with PricewaterhouseCoopers, BDO, and KPMG. This “dwell utilization” helped to coach Vic’s machine studying algorithm over time, enabling it to offer almost “full autonomy” for transaction processing, in line with Hagerup.

“There’s much less bias to mitigate in accounting knowledge, because the outcomes are audited following official requirements, and the audited knowledge is fed again to the algorithms. Since we make predictions throughout 4,500 entities in a number of areas with hundreds of accountants reviewing, any shopper or accounting agency choice — i.e., bias — is eradicated primarily by the dimensions of the information and the evaluate by exterior auditors,” Hagerup mentioned.

Craig Le Clair, principal analyst at Forrester, cautioned {that a} potential Achilles’ heel for AI in finance and accounting is the intensive variation in course of throughout corporations that stops AI options from being developed in a packaged and repeatable manner. Briefly, he says, AI for finance and accounting is “being oversold a bit right this moment.”

“Use circumstances reminiscent of account reconciliation, month-to-month shut, bill processing, monetary planning and evaluation, and adjoining areas like audit and contract analytics depend on intensive numbers and knowledge and are prime candidates for AI, however don’t present worth right this moment. Based mostly on the maturity of used AI elements and adoption traits, AI utilization right this moment is just not widespread,” Le Clair advised VentureBeat by way of electronic mail. “Glancing at Vic.ai, it appears they do some bill extraction. Additionally, they appear to do ‘reconciliation,’ however [they’re] considerably imprecise on the ‘perception’ piece — [it’s unclear] if they’ve a monetary planning and evaluation resolution that competes with specialists in finance and accounting.”

Be this as it might, New York-based Vic has processed greater than 535 million invoices so far for greater than 4,000 company finance and accounting purchasers, amongst them HSB, Intercom, and Armanino. Annual recurring income reached $5 million, rising thrice year-over-year. And Vic expects to almost double the dimensions of its full-time 35-person workforce to 67 by the top of the 12 months.

“From a buyer and market adoption perspective, the pandemic has solely accelerated the utilization of cloud-based platforms for managing accounting work, and we see demand for our options,” Hagerup mentioned. “Vic AI algorithm can carry out reasoning intelligently and adapt to new necessities, making the accounting course of autonomous.”

With this sequence B, Vic has raised $63 million in enterprise capital.