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How AI accounting startup Rillet raised $100M and became a unicorn in 48-hours
Rillet co-founder and CEO Nicholas Koop seems justifiably confident as we talk over Zoom a day after his company announced a $100 million raise at a $1 billion valuation. The US has has a shortage of accountants right now, which is driving growth of his AI-native accounting platform so much, he raised that cash in 48 hours without even trying.
Rillet emerged from stealth two years ago. Since then, it has raised $200 million from top investors like ICONIQ, Andreessen Horowitz, and Sequoia. It’s also amassed 600 customers, most of whom are looking to ditch legacy accounting systems like Oracle and NetSuite, Koop says.
A few weeks ago, Rillet held a board meeting and shared with investors its growth since its $70 million Series B last summer. Annualized revenue rate had doubled in the last quarter alone; the startup added new clients, many of them public companies, and an alliance with EY to introduce AI tools to the auditing giant.
His customers aren’t piloting Rillet either, he said — they’re yanking out ERP and accounting software from competitors like Intuit, NetSuite, or Oracle.
After that board meeting, text messages were fired, calls were made, and 48 hours later, Rillet was a unicorn. The company wasn’t even looking to raise, Koop said.
Seth Pierrepont, the general partner at Iconiq who led the round, said that the deal came together fast but “it wasn’t a cold start,” he described.
“Rillet had already proven it could win against the incumbents that have owned this category for decades,” Pierrepont told TechCrunch. Iconiq also invested in the company’s Series B, and with this latest round, Pierrepont joins the Rillet board. “A year of watching the team deliver on that made doubling down and leading the Series C an easy call.”
Julien Bek, Sequoia’s lead investor on the deal, also said that, though 48 hours might look rushed from the outside, from their perspective, re-investing in Rillet was a “very easy decision,” after the company’s growth in the past year.
“Rillet’s initial wedge is accounting, but ultimately they are reinventing the entire finance function,” Bek told TechCrunch, adding that agentic finance could become “one of the largest application software opportunities of the AI era.” Sequoia led Rillet’s Series A last summer.
“When the opportunity came together,” Bek continued. “We already had all the context we needed.”
Rillet is one of many AI-native startups now giving legacy players a run for relevance. Earlier this year, software stocks on the public market dipped as investors worried about how emerging AI tools would affect them. Koop thinks there’s some truth to that.
“AI is going to come hard at these legacy players,” he said because it is giving customers compelling alternatives.
Rillet, for example, was built for AI agents, not humans, letting humans work alongside the AI agents on corporate bookkeeping. Rillet clients range from laundromats to the NFL Hall of Fame. Some 50% of Rillet customers come from Intuit, 30% from NetSuite and Sage Intacct, and 20% from Oracle, SAP, Workday, and Microsoft products, he said.
Security is critical when working with sensitive client data, Koop said. Rillet includes model routing, so customers can redirect requests to the foundational model of their choice (like OpenAI or Anthropic), and Rillet’s harness prevents these models from training on their data, he says.
There’s also no cross-training — meaning one customer’s data remains proprietary. The agents also have memory, so they can remember and store historical actions they can then use for their own process and improvement.
About three months ago, Rillet released a governance feature letting accountants see and audit every decision the AI agent has made — including what numbers the agents pull and how they calculated them. Creating this was harder than it looks, Koop said, because the team had to compress agent data into a format humans could understand.
Koop said this feature was only possible to build recently because AI agents have gotten so powerful so quickly. They can, for example, now support multi-step workflows over longer periods of time. Because of that, auditing what they are doing has become even more important for clients.
“We barely scratched the surface of potential and opportunity that this technology has,” he said.
Right now, regulations for public companies require that every transaction made by an AI agent be approved by another human. He thinks regulators and top names are watching how the accounting industry evolves around this new technology. He’s hopeful that new rules and regulations will evolve that align more with where everything is headed.
“It’s a very normal process,” he said. “Similar to when the cloud came, of just getting everybody familiar with what’s going on and how it helps the profession.”
Koop also doesn’t think mass job displacement from AI is coming anytime soon, especially in accounting. (Stanford released a report a few weeks ago that found no widespread job displacement yet.) He insists that Rillet isn’t a human replacement, not even for junior accountants. They can use Rillet to help automate and assist with some of the profession’s grunt work.
He also pointed out the expected shortage of accountants in the U.S. The number of those graduating with an accounting degree has been declining since at least 2010. In a recent report, the Controllers Council Organization found that 61% of finance leaders have struggled to find finance, accounting, and CPA talent in the past year. The pullback is not entirely shocking: accountants’ hours are long, the pipeline to the top is arduous, the pay often doesn’t match the workload and the work doesn’t appeal to everyone.
At the same time, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has projected that accounting-related needs are expected to grow by at least 5%, adding 72,800 jobs by 2034. It also doesn’t expect AI to reduce the demand for accountants, even as the technology becomes more widespread. “The automation of routine tasks, such as data entry, will instead make accountants’ advisory and analytical duties more prominent,” the BLS said.
“I just don’t see people losing their job anytime soon,” Koop said. “These people have started their professions to help businesses make better financial decisions,” he added. “We can fully enable them to do that.”
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EuroMatch NPFL: Your Television Cannot Give You This — What Fans Staying Away From The stadium Are Already Missing
There is football you watch, and there is football you experience.
Only three matchweeks into the 2026/27 EuroMatch Nigeria Premier Football League, supporters who have decided to follow the competition exclusively through score updates, social media clips and television are already missing perhaps the most entertaining part of the new season — being there when the story happens.
A screen can show you Fabian Nworie scoring twice from centre-back for Kano Pillars.
It can replay Sadiq Rilwan’s goals for flying Doma United.
It can tell you Mohammed Rabiu Zulkifilu has already scored the season’s first hat-trick.
But a screen cannot completely reproduce the roar that follows a goal, the tension before a penalty, the noise behind an opposition goalkeeper, the songs from the terraces or that beautiful moment when thousands of strangers suddenly jump together because one ball has crossed one line.
That is what the stadium gives you.
And this EuroMatch NPFL season is already providing plenty of reasons to return.
The league is already creating characters
Two matchweeks were enough for unfamiliar names to begin turning into talking points.
Kano Pillars’ Fabian Nworie, a defender, suddenly became one of Matchday Two’s biggest attractions by scoring twice as Pillars raced into a 3-0 lead before surviving Niger Tornadoes’ comeback to win 3-2.
Imagine being inside the Sani Abacha Stadium for that.
One goal.
Another.
Then Tornadoes score.
Then they score again.
Suddenly a comfortable afternoon becomes nervous. Every clearance matters. Every whistle matters. Every second feels longer.
That emotional journey is why people go to football matches.
Elsewhere, Doma United have become the surprise early story. They returned to the top flight and immediately started winning, including a dramatic 1-0 victory over Inter Lagos at Onikan in which Ibrahim Pius produced an important save before Sadiq Rilwan headed the 71st-minute winner.
And now Matchday Three has already brought another Doma statement with their victory over Enyimba.
The supporters who were inside the ground did not merely hear that Doma had beaten one of Nigerian football’s giants.
They watched the moment become history in front of them.
You could be watching tomorrow’s Super Eagle today
Perhaps this is the biggest thing Nigerian supporters sometimes forget about their domestic league.
Before a player becomes the name everybody discusses, somebody saw him first.
Before the overseas move, before the national-team invitation, before the viral compilation and before everybody suddenly claims to have always known how good he was, there are afternoons when that footballer is simply wearing an NPFL shirt and trying to make people remember his name.
That opportunity is sitting in front of supporters again this season.
Zulkifilu has already delivered a hat-trick. Nworie has scored twice from defence. Rilwan has emerged as an early goalscoring attraction. Goalkeepers such as Ibrahim Pius and Akuchie Obinna are building their own stories.
Some will go further than others. That is football.
But imagine the satisfaction years from now of saying:
“I watched him before everybody knew him.”
That is something highlights cannot give you retrospectively.
The stadium gives football its sound
Football without supporters is still a sport.
Football with supporters becomes theatre.
The drums. The arguments. The songs. The celebrations. The man behind you who somehow believes he should be the coach. The supporter predicting a goal seconds before it happens. Children seeing professional footballers metres away instead of through a phone.
Even the collective groan when a striker misses an open chance is part of the experience.
This is not an argument against broadcasting. In fact, wider broadcasting is essential to growing the EuroMatch NPFL. The league has expanded access through its digital coverage, and Matchday Three itself has selected fixtures scheduled across the NPFL/MBI YouTube platforms, Afro Soccer and FRCN.
Broadcasting takes the league to the world.
But supporters inside stadiums give the league its soul.
The two should grow together.
This Sunday, Lagos has an especially good reason to leave the sofa
For supporters in Lagos, Matchday Three offers something that cannot be repeated.
Inter Lagos versus Sporting Lagos.
The first one.
The official NPFL describes Sunday’s encounter at the Mobolaji Johnson Arena, Onikan as the first-ever top-flight meeting between the clubs.
Years from now, if this develops into one of Nigerian football’s great city rivalries, people will talk about the first EuroMatch NPFL Lagos derby.
Somebody will score its first goal.
Somebody could become its first match-winner.
There will be a first celebration, a first heartbreak and a first set of bragging rights.
And there is only one opportunity to say:
“I was there for the first one.”
The match kicks off at 4pm on Sunday, September 13, at the Mobolaji Johnson Arena.
Supporting the league means more than posting about it
Nigerian football belongs to Nigerians.
If supporters want better clubs, bigger player profiles, stronger commercial interest, more valuable sponsorships and a domestic competition capable of commanding greater international attention, then the relationship between clubs and their communities matters.
That is also why the arrival of EuroMatch as title sponsor should be accompanied by a renewed effort to make matchday an attractive entertainment product.
Sponsors need visibility.
Players need audiences.
Clubs need communities.
And supporters need a league that feels like it belongs to them.
Going to the stadium connects all four.
A packed stand makes a player’s great moment look bigger. It makes television pictures more attractive. It gives sponsors greater exposure. It creates atmosphere around clubs. Most importantly, it turns another Sunday fixture into an event people don’t want to miss.
Don’t wait until everybody is talking about them
That might ultimately be the message of this young EuroMatch NPFL season.
Don’t wait until a player earns a national-team call-up before discovering him.
Don’t wait until a Nigerian club makes a continental run before deciding to support it.
Don’t wait for a derby to become famous before attending it.
Don’t wait until everybody is talking about the league before deciding it deserves your attention.
Go and discover the story yourself.
Matchday Three continues Sunday with Abia Warriors against Ikorodu City, Barau FC against Ranchers Bees, Bendel Insurance against Kun Khalifat, Kwara United against Katsina United, Niger Tornadoes against Plateau United and Inter Lagos against Sporting Lagos.
Different cities. Different clubs. Different characters.
But the same invitation.
Come and see your league.
Come with your friends. Bring your children where appropriate. Wear your club colours. Learn the players’ names. Pick a favourite. Sing. Celebrate. Complain about the referee. Debate the coach’s substitution all the way home.
Because somewhere in an EuroMatch NPFL stadium this season, a player you barely know today could be producing the performance everybody will be discussing tomorrow.
And when that moment arrives, there are two ways to experience it.
You can watch the clip later.
**Or you can say: “I was there.”**
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