AI has brought attention to all kinds of futuristic technologies, from humanoid robots to autonomous warships. But there’s a quieter boom happening in a highly traditional industry: accounting. VCs are excited by the prospect of automating costly human labor with AI, funding companies like Numeric and Kick last year, to name a few.
The latest startup to ride this wave is Quanta, which sells an AI-powered accounting platform to software companies and has raised a $4.7 million seed round led by Accel, it exclusively told TechCrunch. Other investors include basecase, Comma Capital, and San Francisco angel investor Elad Gil.
Quanta traces its origins to founder Helen Hastings’ time as a software engineer at buy now, pay later company Affirm, where she saw firsthand how outdated accounting software was. Getting good financial data was highly manual and resulted in reports that only came out once a month.
“I knew I wanted to build something from scratch that could help financial teams and business leaders be more efficient,” Hastings told TechCrunch.
So Quanta’s platform hoovers up data from a company’s existing fintech tools like Brex, Mercury, or Stripe to automatically produce books and real-time reports.
That’s a vision that has tripped up other startups like Bench, which tried — and failed — to automate some of its expensive human bookkeepers (600 strong at its peak) with AI. But Hastings says Quanta will avoid this conundrum by building an AI-first product before hiring lots of bookkeepers. So naturally, it also only initially accepted customers for which its automated system could perform all of the accounting.
The fundraise is also a personal milestone for Hastings as a female founder in a space that’s dominated by men. The percentage of funding that goes to female-only founded companies like Quanta stood at only 2% in 2024, according to PitchBook data. Hastings says that a college instructor once told her that he didn’t picture her becoming a founder. But moments like that one only invigorate her more.
With this fundraise, Hastings says Quanta plans to move beyond its current niche of early-stage software companies to larger businesses, including ones with multiple corporate entities. Hastings says she’s excited for larger organizations to “expect more” from their accounting tools “beyond what incumbents have been able to handle.”
