PYMNTS MonitorEdge May 2024

Light Raises $13 Million to Scale AI-Powered General Ledger

Light, AI, artificial intelligence, accounting

Light has come out of stealth and announced a $13 million financing round to scale its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered general ledger for multinational companies.

With its automated ledger, Light has reimagined the enterprise resource planning (ERP) concept “from the ground up” to deliver a financial suite that is designed for today’s multinationals, the company said in a Wednesday (June 12) press release.

“With Light, our goal is to help companies understand their finances more accurately and quickly by integrating a ledger with a strong application layer, helping them achieve faster growth, stronger operations and greater resilience,” Jonathan Sanders, co-founder and CEO of Light, said in the release.

Light’s platform unifies accounting, tax, payments and reporting across multiple countries and currencies, providing a general ledger that can run all of a company’s global transactions, according to the release.

Its AI cleans transactional data quickly and precisely, ensures that data is correctly recorded in the ledger, and powers a Slackbot that answers both straightforward factual questions and strategic business inquiries, the release said.

With these capabilities, Light’s platform aims to solve challenges faced by multinationals, including complex and fragmented reporting and governance requirements, varying local accounting practices and month-end closing, per the release.

Light provides an alternative to accounting solutions that were “essentially developed in the ‘90s and have been left untouched ever since,” Andreas Helbig, partner at Atomico, which led the funding round, said in the release.

“Light’s made not just a brilliant and much-needed product, but has also made excellent progress in its very early stages — already working with multinational [small- t0 medium-sized businesses] who operate across Europe and the U.S.,” Helbig said. “I’m really pleased that they’ve chosen to partner with us to accelerate their growth and capture his hugely underserved market.”

In another recent product launch catering to multinationals, Tassat Group and Glasstower Digital said in May that they partnered to facilitate cross-border digital B2B payments.

This collaboration leverages blockchain technology and money market funds to provide multinational corporate institutions with secure, immediate and cost-effective solutions for cross-border payments, the two companies said when announcing this new offering.

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