The AI-native ERP funding and customer land-grab
Rillet, an AI-native ERP startup founded by ex-N26 US chief Nicolas Kopp, closed a Series B that challenges entrenched accounting incumbents.
The raise signals investors now want infrastructure built for automation from day one, not legacy systems that vendors bolt AI onto later. Kopp told Reuters his company hunts legacy tools that act as “dumb databases,” and offers a platform that captures data and uses AI to surface real-time insights. High-growth finance teams now scale faster than month-end batch closes allow. Legacy incumbents bolt on AI that breaks at complex consolidation — a gap Rillet exploits.
Fundraising compressed into a sprint. The rounds stacked within a year (table below).
| Round | Amount | Timing | Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed / pre-seed | $13.5M | ~2024 | Undisclosed |
| Series A | $25M | ~June 2025 | Undisclosed |
| Series B | $70M | Aug 6, 2025 | a16z, ICONIQ (co-led), Sequoia participated |
| Total raised | >$100M | Under 12 months | Sequoia, a16z, ICONIQ |
Rillet’s board now includes a16z’s Alex Rampell and ICONIQ’s Seth Pierrepont, who joined with the B round.
Rillet’s about page lists partnerships with EY, KPMG, and RSM alongside its core investors. A source close to the deal pegged the new valuation near $500 million, though the company declined to confirm. In the 12 weeks before the B round, Rillet doubled annual recurring revenue and signed alliances with accounting firms Armanino and Wiss.
Customer wins show the land-grab’s reach. Rillet claims 500+ customers since exiting stealth in 2024, including public companies above $1B in ARR, per its about page. An August 2025 TechStartups report counted just over 200 then, naming AI coding tool Windsurf and e-commerce platform Postscript as users. Rillet’s customer list includes high-growth AI firms Mercor and Function among the logos on its site. At Pallet, controller Nida Rafay said the integration collapsed a billing-to-accounting workflow “from hours to minutes,” shrinking a close that once ate 15 days.
The product backs those claims with native links to Salesforce, Stripe, Brex, and 12,000+ other systems, processing data in real time instead of overnight batches. The founding team of 50-plus Big Four CPAs and legacy ERP operators built Rillet as a full replacement for NetSuite, Sage Intacct, and SAP. Its Aura suite runs specialized accounting agents for accruals, reconciliation, and revenue recognition — not a bolted-on chatbot.
The market split is visible in product approaches: AI-native platforms like Rillet build automation from the ground up, while incumbents such as NetSuite add AI features to existing suites. Rillet’s customer growth indicates the native camp is winning early high-growth segments.
The new capital will speed product development and team expansion, focused on engineers.
Where the hires are going: platform eng and RevOps
Rillet’s live roster on Zero G Talent shows 9 open roles with a median salary band of $240,000. The two newest postings, added in the past seven days, are a Software Engineer in San Francisco and a Software Engineer, Platform in New York City, both paying $150,000–$270,000 per year. The Rillet board data paints a clear picture: the AI-native ERP startup is spending its fresh Series B on engineers rather than a legacy-style sales army.
That spike directly answers the talent pull the round predicted. The jobs land in the two cities where legacy SaaS built its strongholds.
| Role | Location | Salary band (USD/yr) |
|---|---|---|
| Software Engineer | San Francisco | 150,000–270,000 |
| Software Engineer, Platform | New York City | 150,000–270,000 |
| Engineering Manager, Platform Engineering | New York City | 230,000–270,000 |
| Engineering Manager, Product Engineering | San Francisco | 230,000–270,000 |
| Applied AI Engineer | San Francisco | 180,000–240,000 |
| Staff Technical Recruiter | New York City | 170,000–220,000 |
Rillet’s employee footprint mirrors the postings, with New York and San Francisco leading. A recent LinkedIn post said Rillet Recon drew a line around the block in NYC and will expand to San Francisco’s Julia Morgan Ballroom on September 23. Proof the talent communities in both metros engage.
Senior platform leadership signals a permanent build-out. The NYC platform engineering manager role pays at the top of the board’s bands, a figure legacy ERP implementation partners rarely offer full-time. The SF applied AI engineer builds Aura, the agent suite trained on live ledger data. The NYC recruiter role shows Rillet building internal hiring muscle instead of leaning on agencies that staff legacy migrations.
RevOps titles are absent from the board, but the architecture demands revenue operations judgment inside engineering. A recent LinkedIn update detailed a native Deel integration that maps global payroll straight to the GL, classifying earnings, taxes, and deductions per subsidiary. A company post that day noted: “More companies are hiring and paying talent worldwide earlier than ever, and that means global payroll platforms like Deel aren't optional.” The platform also ships native integrations with Stripe, Ramp, Rippling, HubSpot and others, so builders need SaaS billing and finance-close fluency, not just CRUD app skills.
Rillet's about page notes the platform came from CPAs and operators who ran legacy ERP. That heritage explains the hiring bias: they don’t retrain finance staff to use AI add-ons; they hire coders to embed accounting logic. Kopp has said his N26 finance team was world-class, yet simple requests took weeks because systems lagged. The new roles invert that dependency.
Other companies in the space such as Campfire and DualEntry are listed as similar platforms alongside Rillet, but board data shows Rillet’s hiring signals strongest. The talent split shows the strategic divide: native startups hire platform builders in NYC and SF; legacy vendors retrofit features.
If you write backend code and can read a balance sheet, the open Rillet roles in New York and San Francisco pay above legacy implementation gigs and put you on the continuous close instead of the month-end batch.
Legacy ERP vendors counter with bolt-on AI
In December 2024, NetSuite processed 6.4 billion transaction lines (about 19 for every person in the U.S.) across more than 43,000 customers. In November 2025, owner Oracle unveiled NetSuite Next, layering natural-language search and autonomous accounting agents onto the suite first launched as NetLedger in 1998. The move answers AI-native ERPs pitching real-time close as a full replacement.
Incumbents react because finance teams vote with replacement plans. The established vendors cannot afford to lose finance leaders to platforms built on LLMs from the ground up.
NetSuite’s counter, NetSuite Next, debuted in a November 2025 product video. It centers on Ask Oracle, a natural-language interface pulling data, contacts, and actions across the account. The system claims autonomous close via a network of AI agents, anomaly flagging, and dynamic AI-optimized forms. Oracle’s site states the company provides industry-specific cloud suites with built-in AI and machine learning. NetSuite insists its AI is “built in, not bolted on,” arguing that because the suite treats the transaction as business’s atomic unit, models start from source data, not guesses.
Cloud gave you access. AI gives you action.
The retrofit goes beyond interface. NetSuite’s roadmap adds a SuiteApp.AI Marketplace in 2026 for partners to adopt AI inside ERP workflows, then a February 2026 low-code Integration Platform, and an AI Connector Service using the Model Context Protocol to let external LLMs query and act on NetSuite data under existing controls — frames that bolt external models onto the old core. Intuit answers with its own pitch: AI agents and trusted experts at the customer’s side, with configurable agents that monitor and act with approval. Intuit Enterprise Suite shares the AI-enhanced incumbent camp with NetSuite.
The gap appears at hard finance tasks. Rillet’s own comparisons describe SAP as a “Legacy system with AI taped on” and cite long implementations and custom scripts for NetSuite, arguing that bolt-on AI struggles with complex workflows — a tension Rillet’s pitch exploits.
Legacy vendors carry weight startups lack. NetSuite reports over 2 million active users worldwide, including 1.4 million on OneWorld, a base Oracle valued at $9.3 billion when it bought the company in 2016. Rewriting that foundation for continuous close, where accounting happens in real time instead of month-end batches, takes years. NetSuite says its AI delivers a zero-day close; AI-native competitors built that as first principle.
For now the incumbent defense is a preview. NetSuite Next showed in November 2025, with general availability promised next year and a preview flip-switch in months. Finance teams at high-growth companies must decide whether agents layered on a 27-year-old data model beat a native stack. The incumbents’ features are real, but they chase architecture, not just features.
NYC recruiters pivot to specialized AI infra roles
AI role postings on Zero G Talent’s board show concentration in platform engineering at startups rebuilding enterprise software from the model up. AI-native ERP vendors shout loudest in that cohort.
The Rillet raise put the AI accounting platform on a hiring tear captured in the live roster above. Its open roles cluster in New York, where the staff technical recruiter posting stands out as a signal: the startup building its own NYC talent acquisition means external agencies moved too slow. For NYC shops, that means reading job specs mentioning continuous close architecture, native Stripe and Ramp integrations, and ledger-trained accounting agents.
Rillet’s employee base already skews to New York and San Francisco per its listed offices. The new platform engineering manager role doubles down on that footprint. Recruiters who placed early hires now compete for the next wave; pay bands published earlier remove doubt about urgency. A platform engineer in NYC can clear the top of the published band, which legacy SaaS rarely matches.
The two-camp ERP split compounds the recruiter shift. Candidates who have shipped native accrual agents won’t interview for patched incumbents. The market suggests the mandate now is to map talent across the AI-native side exclusively.
The velocity of postings strains shops still running boolean searches for “ERP experience.” The skill bar moved from configuring NetSuite to building real-time GL pipelines. A recruiter who can’t parse that difference loses the client.
The hiring surge masks a sharper internal reallocation. Recruiters are pulling senior sourcers off generic cloud roles and pointing them at applied AI engineer and platform infrastructure reqs. On Zero G Talent, Rillet’s SF applied AI engineer shows the same West Coast skew, but NYC holds the recruiter pivot due to finance-sector density and Rillet’s local concentration.
Staffing a continuous close isn’t like staffing a dashboard. The work demands CPAs who code and engineers who know GAAP. That hybrid expectation filters down from Rillet’s founding team to every hire. Recruiters who built books placing Java CRUD developers now study accounting cycles. The market moved; the pitch has to move with it.
What AI-native ERP means for customer finance teams
Customer finance teams at high-growth AI firms are dropping month-end batch close for continuous real-time accounting on Rillet. The shift pulls them from manual journal entry toward exception review.
The architecture shift
The change starts with design. Rillet’s founders — CPAs from the Big Four and legacy ERP operators — knew the pain of running finance on old software. The platform uses continuous close, rather than periodic batches. For a finance team at Mercor (which pays domain experts over $4 million per day to train frontier models, per its mission page), the close never becomes a fire drill. The books reflect current cash, burn, and runway without a month-end scramble.
Rillet's Aura AI suite puts specialized accounting agents on the live general ledger. One agent scans financial data to spot missing accruals, drafts journal entries, and flags exceptions for controller review. Another handles reconciliation and revenue. This is not a chatbot; it is trained on accounting. The workflow changes who does what on a finance team.
| Finance process | Legacy ERP (batch) | AI-native ERP (Rillet) |
|---|---|---|
| Close cadence | Month-end batches | Real-time continuous close |
| Accruals | Staff draft manually | AI drafts, controller reviews flags |
| Revenue recognition | Periodic, off-GL dashboards | Real-time from GL, native ARR/MRR |
| SaaS metrics | Spreadsheet pulls | Surfaced from GL automatically |
Why humans still anchor the team
The table shows the finance team’s role doesn’t vanish; it moves up the judgment chain. A controller still signs off on AI-generated accruals. That matches Mercor’s benchmark work on white-collar agents. TechCrunch reported in January 2026 that Mercor’s APEX-Agents test gave every AI lab a failing grade: even the best models answered only about a quarter of real professional queries correctly. The models stumbled most on tracking information across multiple domains — exactly the cross-system view a finance leader needs.
So for customer finance teams, AI-native ERP does not delete headcount. It rewrites the job description. Finance team hiring at high-growth AI customers shifts from bookkeepers who key in transactions to operators who read real-time GL outputs and intervene when an agent flags a pattern. Rillet’s native integrations with payment and HR platforms drop middleware maintenance from the role entirely.
Mercor’s scale — a reported $20 billion valuation talk in July 2026 per TechCrunch — shows the AI-native customer forcing this composition change.
The concrete move for a finance leader at a high-growth AI firm: list every month-end task your team runs, then map each to a Rillet agent output. Hire one controller for every two agents, not ten clerks for one close.
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