Dive Brief:

• U.S. enterprise software startup Maximor raised $9 million in funding to expand its artificial intelligence-powered finance automation platform, which is designed to help speed up accounting tasks such as the closing of books at the end of each month, according to a Monday announcement.
• Among other challenges, the month-end close process can be slowed down by legacy software systems, such as enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management tools, that don’t talk to each other, Maximor CEO Ramnandan Krishnamurthy said in an interview.
• The company’s “secret sauce” is its team of AI agents that can perform data reconciliations and other tasks while working seamlessly across such systems, according to the chief executive, who previously worked at Microsoft. “We’re basically building up an agentic platform that can work with the existing systems that a company has,” he said.

Dive Insight:

The announcement comes at a time when many finance leaders are under pressure “to steer strategy while their teams are buried in reconciliations, close checklists, and fragmented systems,” the New York-headquartered company said in a press release.

Despite “millions poured into ERPs and accounting tools, technical limitations forced critical workflows back into spreadsheets — creating endless manual work, slow closes, and costly errors,” according to the release. 

Rently, a provider of software tools for the rental housing industry, was able to reduce its month-end close process in half from eight days to four within the first month of using the Maximor platform, the release said.

Krishnamurthy co-founded the firm with Ajay Krishna Amudan, another Microsoft veteran. The new influx of cash will, in part, allow the company to focus on making its AI agents more accurate and reliable with increased capabilities, Krishnamurthy told CFO Dive. 

The funding round was led by Foundation Capital, with participation from Gaia Ventures and Boldcap, according to the release.

The number of companies offering agentic AI-powered tools to automate workflows is rapidly growing.

Gartner predicts that 33% of enterprise software applications will include agentic AI by 2028, up from less than 1% in 2024, with at least 15% of day-to-day work decisions being made autonomously through the technology.

More than eight in 10 finance and accounting professionals say technologies like AI agents and generative AI chatbots could become standard tools for the profession within the next five years, according to Deloitte survey results released in late July.

More than 40% of respondents said increased efficiency and productivity are the greatest benefits of using AI agents to support finance and accounting processes. Other cited benefits include enhanced data analysis and insights as well as improved accuracy and error reduction.

However, Deloitte found that just 13.5% of organizations were using AI agents to support finance and accounting tasks, with about a third saying they were building or had future plans to adopt the technology.

“There is significant momentum around agentic tools and their potential to transform finance functions,” Jonathan Haynes, a controllership and treasury transformation leader at Deloitte said in a press release at the time. “However, it's clear that barriers remain which are slowing adoption, particularly around building trust and honing talent.”