Rillet co-founder and CEO Nicolas Kopp said in a Zoom conversation the day after the announcement that his company had closed a $100 million round at a $1 billion valuation. According to the company, investors committed the financing within 48 hours after seeing recent growth metrics presented at a board meeting.
Two years out of stealth, Rillet has now raised $200 million from investors including Iconiq, Andreessen Horowitz, and Sequoia. The company serves about 600 customers, from small businesses to public companies. Kopp says many customers are replacing legacy ERP and accounting systems such as Oracle and NetSuite with Rillet.
Why the round moved so quickly
At a board meeting following last summer’s $70 million Series B, Rillet told investors that its annualized revenue run rate had doubled in the most recent quarter, that it had added new customers including public companies, and that it had formed an alliance with EY to roll out AI tools for auditing. After that meeting, quick messages and calls led to a closed deal within 48 hours; Kopp says Rillet wasn’t actively seeking new capital.
Seth Pierrepont, general partner at Iconiq who led the round, said the transaction came together fast but was not a "cold start," noting that Rillet had already proven it could beat incumbents. Pierrepont, whose firm also co-led the Series B, will join Rillet’s board. Julien Bek, Sequoia’s lead on the deal, likewise called reinvestment an easy decision given the company’s growth over the past year.
Product design and customer mix
Rillet was built for AI agents to operate alongside humans in corporate bookkeeping rather than as a human-centric tool. Clients range from laundromats to a major sports franchise. Kopp provided a breakdown of customer origin: roughly 50% migrated from Intuit, 30% from NetSuite and Sage Intacct, and 20% from Oracle, SAP, Workday, and Microsoft products.
Security, governance, and agent capabilities
Security is a central concern when handling sensitive financial data. Rillet offers model routing so customers can send requests to the foundational model of their choice (for example, OpenAI or Anthropic). According to Kopp, Rillet’s system prevents those external models from training on customer data. The platform does not cross-train between customers — each customer’s data remains proprietary — and agents have memory to retain historical actions for improving their own processes.
About three months ago, Rillet introduced a governance feature that lets accountants review and audit every decision made by an AI agent, including which numbers were pulled and how calculations were performed. Kopp said building that feature was technically challenging because agent data had to be compressed into formats humans can interpret. He added that recent advances in agent capabilities made such features possible, as agents can now support multi-step workflows over longer timeframes.
Regulation and workforce impact
Current rules for public companies require a human to approve every transaction executed by an AI agent. Kopp believes regulators and major industry players are watching how accounting adapts to AI and that rules will evolve over time in step with the technology, similar to the transition to cloud computing.
Kopp does not expect mass job displacement in accounting in the near term. He cited a Stanford report that found no widespread job losses so far and emphasized that Rillet intends to augment, not replace, human accountants — for example by automating routine tasks so junior accountants can focus on higher-value work.
Labor market context
Kopp pointed to a projected shortage of accountants in the U.S.: the number of graduates with accounting degrees has been declining since at least 2010. The Controllers Council Organization reported that 61% of finance leaders struggled to find finance, accounting, and CPA talent over the past year. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects at least 5% growth in accounting-related employment, adding roughly 72,800 jobs by 2034, and does not expect AI to reduce demand; instead, the BLS says automation of routine tasks will amplify accountants’ advisory and analytical duties.
Kopp summed up by saying the company has only begun to explore the technology’s potential and that the current developments represent early stages of a much larger opportunity.
