Exclusive: Accounting AI startup Rillet reaches unicorn status with $1 billion valuation. Its founder says he wants to give CFOs back their weekends

Rillet, a two-year-old AI-powered accounting startup, has reached a $1 billion valuation following a $100 million Series C funding round led by ICONIQ. The company, which launched roughly two years ago, now serves over 600 customers, including several AI-focused firms like Neuralink, Skild AI and Mercor, as well as non-tech businesses such as waste recycling and movie studios.

Rillet's CEO, Nicolas Kopp, aims to help CFOs avoid the tedious spreadsheet work that keeps them occupied beyond regular business hours. He envisions AI as a "tireless back office" that assists finance professionals without replacing them. Kopp emphasizes that the company's mission is to make finance teams more efficient, offering a "cleaner, more consistent financial data" and a complete audit trail, while preserving the expertise of finance professionals.

Rillet's architecture stands out from traditional enterprise resource planning systems, which were designed for human data input and review, leaving finance chiefs burdened with routine tasks. Instead, Rillet's AI agents can run hundreds of operations simultaneously, executing much of the manual accounting work that typically consumes finance teams' time.

The company has strengthened its credibility by partnering with EY for AI-native finance transformation and collaborating with more than half of the Accounting Today top 20 CPA firms. Rillet's rapid growth can be attributed to advancements in AI models, which have enabled the automation of tasks that once took humans a full day, now taking mere minutes.

As the accounting profession faces a talent shortage, Kopp sees AI agents as a means to compensate for the dwindling pool of human accountants, even as business complexity continues to rise.