AI Finance Startup Light Secures $30M Series A to Challenge Legacy ERP Giants

Key takeaways

Copenhagen-headquartered Light has raised $30 million in a Series A funding round led by Balderton Capital, positioning the AI-native finance platform to compete directly with legacy enterprise resource planning systems from Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP.

The investment comes as the company reports 30x growth over the past 12 months, with customers reducing finance operations time by 84% after switching from legacy ERPs.

Built from scratch for AI, not retrofitted

Founded in 2022 by serial entrepreneur Jonathan Sanders, Light was built to overcome the limitations of financial systems designed for a different era.

Unlike competitors that layer artificial intelligence onto decades-old infrastructure, the company designed its platform with AI embedded at its core from day one.

"We're not patching old systems with chatbots," said Jonathan Sanders, founder and CEO of Light. "We built finance software from scratch for how companies actually operate today. Companies shouldn't have to spend $50,000 and 5 months just to expand into a new country. With Light, it happens instantly. ERP was built for factories. Light is built for the fastest-growing companies of the 21st century."

The platform's performance capabilities underscore this architectural difference. While traditional systems falter at processing one million records, Light can handle 280 million in less than a second.

Balance sheets generate instantly, and multi-entity accounting, cross-border payments, and expense management are automated across jurisdictions.

Investor confidence and market validation

Atomico, Cherry Ventures, Seedcamp, and Entrée Capital also participated in the round, alongside notable angels including Thomas Wolf (Co-founder and Chief Science Officer, Hugging Face), Charles Songhurst (Board Member, Meta), and several customers-turned-investors.

"We've seen countless finance platforms over the years, but almost all of them tweak at the edges," said Rob Moffat, Partner at Balderton Capital. "Light is the first to throw out the old playbook."

"By rebuilding the general ledger from scratch instead of bolting onto legacy systems, they've unlocked the full power of AI. The result is dramatic," Moffat added.

Traction with high-growth companies

Light's customers include Lovable, the Swedish AI firm recently valued at $2 billion, and Sana Labs, which is being acquired by Workday for $1.1 billion.

The platform is already trusted by high-growth businesses, including Lovable, Sana, and Legora, who have consolidated fragmented finance tools into Light's single system of record.

"We service fast-growing, fast-scaling companies who need a system where they can expand really fast," Sanders told CNBC.

The company has integrated with global infrastructure providers such as JP Morgan, Adyen, and BDO, combining enterprise-grade reliability with startup agility.

Aggressive growth plans

The funding brings Light's total raised to $43 million. The Series A funding will accelerate Light's geographic expansion by setting up a new office in New York to meet client demand.

The company plans to triple its engineering team by Q2 2026, launch a process-optimization workbench, and further build out the deployment department.

The startup recently opened an office in London and is planning to open one in New York to meet U.S. demand.

Light's engineering team, with experience at Spotify, Google, Klarna, AWS, Booking.com, and Shopify, is building a finance system engineered for global scale rather than rigid workflows.

Growing market for AI-powered finance

Light's fundraising comes amid surging investor interest in AI-powered finance automation.

Pigment, a business planning and forecasting platform designed to be more user-friendly than Microsoft Excel, last year raised $145 million at a valuation north of $1 billion.

More recently, accounting software startup Pennylane raised 75 million euros ($88.4 million), doubling its valuation to 2 billion euros.

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