Light raises $30M Series A led by Balderton to automate finance and accounting, targets US expansion

Light raises $30M to automate finance: what CFOs should know

Danish startup Light secured $30 million in Series A funding led by Balderton Capital. Other backers include Atomico, Cherry Ventures, Seedcamp, and Entrée Capital, plus angels Thomas Wolf (Hugging Face) and Charlie Songhurst (Meta). Founded in 2022, Light builds AI software to automate accounting, bookkeeping, and financial reporting.

Headquartered in Copenhagen, the company has opened a London office and is planning New York to support U.S. customers. The new capital will fuel commercial expansion and enterprise sales.

What the product does

Light automates finance workflows that eat time and create risk: coding expenses, enforcing policies, reconciling accounts, and generating reports. The team says "the future of numbers is text," meaning an AI agent can read your policies, contracts, and controls, then apply them consistently.

Example: instead of searching documents for a team's meal allowance, an agent with access to your policy library can approve or flag a transaction in real time and record the rationale. Every action is auditable and tied back to source text.

Why finance leaders care

Incumbent systems from Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP are capable but often heavy, with long configuration cycles. Light is pitching faster deployment for fast-scaling companies that outgrow spreadsheets and custom scripts.

For large enterprises, the appeal is coverage across "broken processes and workflows" that sprawl across entities and regions. As one executive put it, "No human team can continuously analyze, reconcile and update thousands of pages of policies for coherence."

Market signal

Finance automation is attracting capital across Europe. Planning platform Pigment raised $145 million at a valuation above $1 billion, while Pennylane secured €75 million, doubling its valuation to €2 billion.

Light's reference customers include Lovable (valued at $2 billion) and Sana Labs, which is being acquired by Workday for $1.1 billion. That mix suggests traction with high-growth teams and relevance to enterprise buyers.

How to evaluate AI finance platforms

• Start with 3-5 repetitive, high-volume tasks: AP coding, T&E policy checks, bank recs, accruals, revenue recognition support.
• Map data sources (ERP, HRIS, cards, banks, billing). Confirm APIs, export formats, and event triggers; require SSO and role-based access.
• Demand auditability: clear logs, source-of-truth links, versioned policies, and an approval trail for every exception.
• Assess policy ingestion: can the system read PDFs, emails, and contract clauses, and show the exact text used in a decision?
• Security and compliance: SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, data residency options, encryption at rest/in transit, admin controls.
• Pilot design: one entity or region, 60-90 days; baseline cycle time, error rate, close duration, and exception volume. Set pass/fail thresholds.
• Integration fit: Microsoft, Oracle, or SAP connectivity; webhooks for near-real-time updates; change management plan for your close calendar.
• Cost model: all-in TCO (licenses, implementation, integration, internal time). Identify headcount hours you can redeploy and where you still need humans-in-the-loop.
• Risk management: drift monitoring, policy change alerts, rollback plans, and regular review cadences with Finance and Internal Audit.
• Vendor stability: uptime SLAs, support response times, security posture, and references in your industry and scale band.

What this could change in your month-end

Policy-driven decisions move earlier in the cycle, reducing last-week scrambles. Exception queues shrink, documentation improves, and auditors can trace logic without manual screenshots.

If you're building your own AI playbook for Finance, explore practical training and tools. See a curated list of AI tools for finance to benchmark features and gaps.

Bottom line

Light's $30 million raise signals rising demand for AI that handles policy-heavy finance work at scale. If you face long close cycles and patchwork workflows, it's worth running a structured pilot and letting the numbers decide.