Fresh off a $100 million Series C that valued the company at $1 billion, Rillet is positioned as one of the fastest-growing disruptors in the accounting and ERP space. Oak is honored to have participated in the three most recent rounds, supporting the company’s raise of more than $200 million in total funding.
Founded in 2021, Rillet bets that AI can do more than augment decades-old accounting software. Here, co-founder and CEO Nic Kopp discusses the company’s push upmarket, how AI is changing the way accounting work gets done and what the ERP of the future might look like.
Rillet has gone from 200-plus customers last August to more than 600 today. How much of your business is now enterprise versus venture-backed startups? Of those 600-plus customers, do you know how many actually stopped using Oracle Fusion, SAP, Workday, or another ERP to move to Rillet?
We continue to support some of the fastest-growing AI companies of all time like Mercor and LangChain, but our core customer base is rapidly expanding into new verticals. Forty percent of our net new customers come from outside tech like healthcare, logistics, robotics, defense, biotech, and professional services. This also means that we’re not just displacing NetSuite and Sage. We’re moving complex enterprises off Oracle Fusion, SAP, Workday, and Great Plains.
You talk about a “zero-day close.” How many customers are actually achieving that today, and what exactly qualifies as a zero-day close?
“Zero-day close” is somewhat aspirational, and it requires both a mindset shift and a technology shift to perfect. Most of our customers close their books within a handful of days now, but a few quite literally close their books within 6 hours. I’ll get texts from some of our customers like “Hey, I just closed the books by 1:30 pm. I’m headed to Costco for a pizza.”
The reality we’re operating in today lets us completely rethink how finance is done, both from a technology and process standpoint. As AI agents take on more and more of the fundamental accounting tasks, human work moves up the stack. Accountants will spend more time on judgment and adjudicating exceptions. Meanwhile, you have incredibly smart individuals doing menial tasks because the technology just works against them.
How much accounting work is your AI actually doing autonomously today?
It’s not just marketing hype. Aura is genuinely taking work off controllers’ plates every day, with Rillet AI Agent usage growing 70% month over month. One of our customers, Ben, a controller at Highway, uses Aura to identify which customers need chasing for payment and even draft follow-up emails. That saves him 10 hours a week. Another public company CFO uses Aura to reduce their cash reconciliation from four days to five minutes across 40 different bank accounts.
Aura works in the background too. Our prepaid module is basically touchless. Aura pulls the PDFs from the customer’s AP system, reads the service period, inputs that data into Rillet, and immediately books all approved entries to the prepaid subledger. It’s incredible.
Every enterprise software company is adding AI now. What can an “AI-native” ERP fundamentally do that NetSuite or SAP couldn't reproduce by adding AI to their existing products?
A legacy ERP like Oracle or SAP is a system of record. It assumes humans are the rate-limiting step in accounting. Data enters the system through forms people fill out, and the software's job is to make those forms efficient, route them through approval workflows, and store the results. Every architectural choice flows from that assumption.
Rillet is an event reasoning engine and a system of verifiable proof. Its primary job is not to store transactions, but to reason about the business's financial state in real time and create an auditable chain of evidence to support that reasoning. As a result, the system does not just store the “what,” but also dynamically proves the “why” for each transaction.
Five years from now, what is Rillet's moat – the models, the accounting data model, integrations, workflow data, distribution, or something else?
Rillet’s core moat will always be our velocity and customer service. As long as we move fast and take care of our customers, we can’t lose.
We’ve also built one of the best brands in the office of the CFO today. Part of this is Close Club, our finance leaders community, and our annual conference, Rillet Recon. We’re not interested in just building software. We’re here to fundamentally rebuild how finance gets done and elevate the role of the accountants and finance leaders within their organizations.
Our other moats will remain a secret for now :)
You can now connect Aura to Claude, Salesforce, Snowflake, and other outside systems. If companies can increasingly put an AI agent on top of their financial data wherever it lives, why do they need to replace the underlying ERP at all?
Twelve months ago, it was accepted wisdom that “ChatGPT wrappers” would go to zero. The opposite is happening. Value is accruing to the systems that can orchestrate agents most efficiently in speed and cost.
Rillet moves beyond a system of record that stores transactions and becomes the harness through which finance work gets done. People and agents share the same financial data, apply the same accounting policies and controls, and work from a single, continuously updated view of the business. Agents perform increasingly complex financial work, while finance teams retain visibility, approval authority, and a complete audit trail.
We believe the ERP will become “thicker” over time, not thinner. Long-horizon accounting work like the close requires owning the full context of the data along with the fundamental understanding of which context actually matters
What happens when you get into extremely complex multinational structures, manufacturing, inventory, tax jurisdictions, or industry-specific workflows?
It’s already happening. We built Rillet to be highly customizable so clients can tailor it to their actual workflow rather than reshaping their process around us. We have a public company on Rillet that operates in about fifteen countries and forty currencies. NetSuite simply couldn’t handle their complexity.
As our customers’ complexities grow, we utilize AI to grow with them. We’ve built the infrastructure so when a CFO has feedback on the platform, our customer success manager (who also happens to be a highly trained CPA) can tell our AI agents exactly what to build. The agent then builds it, an engineer approves it, and it ships directly to production. We literally have CPAs building for CPAs. This is the absolute future of how software will be built over the next decade.
If AI really does automate much of the close, what happens to accounting teams? Does Rillet ultimately allow a $1 billion-revenue company to operate with half as many accountants? What roles do you think actually disappear, and which become more important?
I don’t know of any customer of ours who is firing their teams. What actually happens is they can be selective in hiring and save costs that way. In the long term, there may even be more accounting jobs, not fewer. AI requires more engineering jobs today, not fewer. I think the same will happen in accounting.
