- London-based Briefcase raises $3 million in a seed funding round led by Earlybird, with participation from Entrepreneur First, Tiny, and prominent angel investors, including the founders of accounting tech unicorn Pennylane.
- Developing the world’s first AI-native accounting automation platform, Briefcase aims to eliminate tedious accounting tasks from bookkeeping to month-end close.
- Briefcase seamlessly integrates with popular ledger solutions like Xero and QuickBooks, surpassing traditional OCR-based tools by leveraging multimodal AI to automate complex reasoning tasks that traditionally require human input.
- The newly secured funding will enable Briefcase to assemble a world-class team of engineers and product experts to accelerate product development and serve an expanding customer base of early adopters.
London, UK – December 3, 2024 – Briefcase, the AI-native accounting automation startup, today announced that it has raised $3 million (£2.4 million) in a seed funding round led by Earlybird. The round also saw participation from Entrepreneur First, Tiny, and prominent angel investors including Charlie Songhurst, Mark Ransford, Greg Marsh, Bill Earner, Chris Mairs and executives from breakout companies such as Pennylane (accounting tech), Deel (payroll), Pleo (payments), and 11X (AI agents).
Briefcase is building the world’s first AI-native accounting automation platform designed to automate the most manual and time-consuming aspects of accounting, from bookkeeping to month-end close using technologies like multimodal AI, agentic workflows, and embeddings.
“The accounting industry has only seen one major innovation in the past decade—the move from desktop to cloud. With the rise of multimodal AI, we’re positioned to lead the coming AI revolution.“
Reuben Steenkamp, co-founder and CEO of Briefcase.
Accounting firms today are burdened with manual, time-consuming tasks and face challenges in hiring and retaining junior staff to manage the workload. In the UK, many have turned to outsourcing—a solution that often raises quality concerns and demands additional management oversight. The founders of Briefcase believe there’s a better way. They envision a future where AI takes over these tedious processes, freeing accountants to focus on strategic advisory roles that offer greater value to their clients.
Despite being in its pre-launch phase, Briefcase has already partnered with several accounting firms in the UK, including a top 100 practice. The company is currently in beta with select early adopters, actively engaging with them to refine its product through frequent feedback and a validated product roadmap.
“LLMs, vision models, and the new scaling potential of reasoning unlock a completely new paradigm of automation in accounting than was possible before. We’ve been following this category for a long time and knew we had found the right team to execute against it after our first interaction with Reuben and Ján. They combine deep domain understanding with an incredible learning rate around the AI engineering needed to deliver truly agentic capabilities to this industry.”
Earlybird Principal Akash Bajwa
With the global accounting industry valued at approximately $627 billion, Briefcase is poised to transform the sector by automating the grunt work that burdens accounting professionals. The new funding will allow the company to expand its team by hiring top engineers and product specialists, accelerating product development, and better serving its growing base of early adopters.
About Briefcase
Briefcase is a London-based startup redefining how accounting is done by developing the world’s first AI-native accounting automation platform. Founded by Reuben Steenkamp, formerly part of the CFO office at Starling Bank, and Jan Stehlik, who previously built AI systems at fintech startup Nous, Briefcase aims to eliminate tedious accounting tasks using agentic AI technologies. Early adopters and job applicants can learn more here.
About Earlybird
Founded in 1997, Earlybird identifies and backs exceptional early-stage companies on a pan-European basis – supporting them through their growth and development phases and providing financial resources, strategic support, plus access to an international network and capital markets. Through two separate strategies, Earlybird focuses on tech-enabled businesses in fintech/ insurtech, enterprise software, and deep tech (energy, food, and space) while Earlybird Health focuses on improving patient outcomes. Earlybird additionally has a Growth Opportunity Fund for follow-on investments, and a pro-bono impact initiative, Vision Lab. With EUR 2.5 billion under management across fund streams and a history of 9 IPOs and 35 trade sales, Earlybird is among Europe’s most established and active venture capital firms. More information on www.earlybird.com, LinkedIn, and X.
