AI accounting startup Light raises $30M to kill legacy ERPs

London-based startup Light has raised a $30 million Series A to take on the giants of corporate finance like NetSuite and SAP. The company is betting that its “AI-native” accounting platform can do what decades of fintech challengers haven’t: finally kill the spreadsheet and the clunky enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems that run modern business.

The round, led by Balderton Capital, comes as Light reports 30x growth over the last year.

According to the company, its platform can process 280 million records in under a second, a speed designed for the “hypergrowth” companies it targets. Light claims customers switching from legacy tools are cutting their finance operations time by 84%.

An AI-native attack on the general ledger

Unlike competitors who are adding AI features to decades-old software architecture, Light says it has rebuilt the entire finance stack from the ground up. This ground-up approach has attracted investors like Atomico and high-profile angels including Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf. The pitch is that by rethinking the core general ledger, Light can automate complex tasks like multi-entity accounting, global payments, and expense management that cripple scaling companies.

The funding, which brings Light’s total to $43 million, will be used to open a New York office and triple its engineering team.

Light is positioning itself as the infrastructure layer for a new generation of companies that can’t afford to be slowed down by last-century software.