Danish company Sumary has raised $25m in a seed round led by Singular, which it calls the largest seed round for accounting software in Europe. The money will take its AI tool, already used by Deloitte and Grant Thornton, to more accountants.
Photo: The Sumary team.
Sumary raised a $4.2m pre-seed round a year ago, and has since signed several of Europe's largest accounting firms as customers. The rounds come as the accounting industry faces a shortage of people to do the manual preparation work that has traditionally taken up much of an accountant's time, and as a growing number of startups develop AI tools specifically aimed at taking over that work.
Sumary describes itself as an operating system for accounting work, in which artificial intelligence runs a firm's core workflows — from the month-end close to VAT returns and year-end preparation — regardless of which ledger each client already uses. Each piece of work is meant to arrive ready-prepared, so the accountant only needs to review and sign it off.
According to the company, firms using Sumary save more than 50% of the time this work used to take. Sumary also reasons across a client's full set of numbers, from the profit and loss account to the balance sheet and cash flow, letting an accountant ask questions about the figures and get answers traced back to the underlying transactions.
Pascar Sivam, co-founder and chief executive of Sumary, points to an industry that simply lacks enough people to do the work manually. That means valuable work goes undone, and clients who are not a firm's largest rarely learn what is actually happening in their numbers.
Sivam believes the accountants who remain in the profession will become more valuable than ever, because the manual work was never the point of the job — judgement was. The company's aim is to free up enough time for that judgement to be applied to more clients.
Customers already using Sumary include Deloitte, Grant Thornton and Baker Tilly. "Sumary's AI and accounting workflows are a superpower every accountant deserves," says Mads Faurschou, partner at Deloitte.
The seed round is led by the investor Singular. byFounders, Partech and Tenity, which backed the company at pre-seed, are investing again in this round. The capital will go towards strengthening the sales team and adding more accountants working directly with clients, while the company's AI research team — which includes PhDs in machine learning — continues testing and improving its models against its own accounting benchmarks.
Sumary currently has customers across the Nordics and the UK, and says Benelux is next.
Sources: Sumary
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