Modern finance teams are under more pressure than ever. Companies want faster reporting, cleaner numbers, tighter controls, and better visibility into what is happening across the business. But many accounting teams are still stuck using systems that were built for an older way of working. They spend hours reconciling data, checking spreadsheets, closing books, and pulling reports from tools that do not always speak to each other well.
That is the problem Nicolas Kopp is trying to solve with Rillet.
As the co-founder and CEO of Rillet, Kopp is building an AI-native ERP platform for accounting and finance teams that need speed without losing accuracy. His goal is not just to make accounting software look cleaner or feel more modern. The bigger idea is to rebuild the financial system of record for companies that have outgrown slow, manual, and fragmented workflows.
Kopp’s background makes the story more interesting. Before launching Rillet, he served as the U.S. CEO of N26, the digital bank that became one of Europe’s best-known fintech companies. Before that, he worked in investment banking at Morgan Stanley. That mix of banking, operations, fintech, and accounting experience gave him a close view of how important financial infrastructure becomes when a company is growing fast.
With Rillet, Nicolas Kopp is taking on one of the least glamorous but most important parts of business software: the general ledger.
Who is Nicolas Kopp
Nicolas Kopp is best known today as the co-founder and CEO of Rillet, but his career started long before the company entered the AI accounting conversation.
He studied at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland and later earned a master’s degree in accounting from the London School of Economics. Those academic roots matter because Rillet is not simply a software idea wrapped around finance buzzwords. It is being built by someone who understands accounting as a business discipline, not just as a market category.
Kopp also spent several years at Morgan Stanley, where he worked in investment banking. That experience likely gave him a strong view of financial reporting, investor expectations, complex company structures, and the kind of accuracy that finance teams must deliver when decisions involve capital, growth, and risk.
His later role as U.S. CEO of N26 pushed him even closer to the world of modern financial infrastructure. Digital banking requires speed, trust, compliance, and reliable data systems. It is not enough for the product to look simple from the outside. Behind the scenes, the financial engine has to be accurate, scalable, and dependable.
That background helps explain why Nicolas Kopp chose to build Rillet. He saw that many finance teams were trying to run modern companies on outdated accounting systems. The gap between how fast companies operate and how slowly their finance tools work became too large to ignore.
The problem Nicolas Kopp saw in traditional accounting software
Accounting software is supposed to help companies understand their numbers. In reality, many finance teams still spend too much time cleaning data, checking entries, chasing information, and moving numbers between systems.
Legacy ERP platforms can be powerful, but they are often slow to implement, expensive to maintain, and difficult to adapt. They were built for a world where finance teams worked in fixed cycles, data moved more slowly, and businesses did not expect real-time answers from every department.
That is no longer how companies operate.
A fast-growing SaaS company may need to understand revenue changes daily. A CFO may need updated numbers before a board meeting. A controller may need to close the books quickly while managing multiple entities, currencies, vendors, and payment systems. A finance team may need to pull data from Salesforce, Stripe, Brex, Ramp, Rippling, and other tools without creating a messy spreadsheet layer in the middle.
This is where the pain becomes obvious. Finance teams are asked to move quickly, but their tools often slow them down.
The month-end close can stretch longer than expected. Reconciliation can become a manual grind. Reporting can depend on too many spreadsheet checks. Accountants can spend more time fixing workflow problems than analyzing the business.
Nicolas Kopp built Rillet around the belief that this old model needs to change.
How Rillet is rethinking the general ledger
The general ledger is the financial backbone of a company. It records the core accounting activity that helps leaders understand revenue, expenses, assets, liabilities, and equity. If the ledger is slow, disconnected, or hard to work with, the entire finance function feels the drag.
Rillet is designed as an AI-native ERP with the general ledger at the center. Instead of adding AI features to an older accounting system, the company is building a finance platform from the ground up for modern workflows.
That distinction matters.
A modern finance team does not only need a place to store numbers. It needs a system that can support automated journal entries, real-time reporting, revenue recognition, multi-entity consolidation, reconciliation, audit trails, and investor-ready financial data.
Rillet aims to reduce the manual work that slows down accounting teams. By connecting with the tools companies already use, it can help bring financial data into one cleaner system. That gives CFOs, controllers, and accounting teams a more current view of the business.
The promise is not that accountants disappear from the process. The better version is that accountants spend less time on repetitive cleanup and more time on judgment, controls, planning, and analysis.
That is where Rillet fits into the next wave of accounting software. It is not trying to make finance less serious. It is trying to make finance more responsive.
Why modern finance teams need faster accounting workflows
Speed in finance is not just about moving faster for the sake of it. It changes how a business makes decisions.
When financial data is late, leaders make choices with an incomplete view. Hiring plans can be delayed. Budgets can become outdated. Investor updates can take longer. Forecasts can lose accuracy. Even simple questions, such as how much revenue came from a certain customer segment or how expenses changed across teams, can become harder to answer than they should be.
For a modern finance team, faster accounting workflows can create real business value.
A shorter close gives leaders more time to act on the numbers. Better reconciliation reduces the risk of errors. Real-time reporting helps teams spot issues earlier. Automated workflows give accountants more room to focus on strategic work. Clean financial data also makes board reporting, fundraising preparation, and operational planning much smoother.
This is the kind of business problem Nicolas Kopp is targeting with Rillet.
The product is not only about accounting efficiency. It is about giving companies a clearer financial picture while the information is still fresh enough to matter.
How Nicolas Kopp’s fintech background shaped Rillet
Nicolas Kopp’s time in fintech is one of the reasons Rillet feels different from a typical accounting software startup.
At N26, Kopp worked in a world where user experience, compliance, speed, and financial infrastructure all had to fit together. A digital bank cannot afford to treat financial systems as an afterthought. The customer-facing product may look simple, but the backend must handle complexity with precision.
That way of thinking appears to carry into Rillet.
Accounting software has to be dependable. It cannot be flashy at the expense of accuracy. It has to earn trust from finance teams because those teams are responsible for the numbers that investors, executives, auditors, and regulators depend on.
At the same time, finance software can no longer feel frozen in time. Modern companies expect tools that are fast, connected, and easier to use. The best finance platforms need the discipline of traditional accounting and the speed of modern software.
That balance is central to Rillet’s identity.
Kopp’s experience at Morgan Stanley and N26 helps position him as a founder who understands both sides of the problem: the need for financial accuracy and the need for better technology.
Rillet’s growth and investor confidence
The market has taken notice of Rillet.
The company was founded in 2021 by Nicolas Kopp and Stelios Modes, who serves as CTO. Modes brings deep engineering experience from companies such as ThoughtWorks and Shazam, while Kopp brings finance, banking, and operating experience.
Together, they are building in a category that is both difficult and valuable. ERP software sits at the center of finance operations, so replacing legacy systems is not easy. Companies do not casually switch the software that handles their books. That makes Rillet’s momentum especially meaningful.
In 2025, Rillet raised a $25 million Series A led by Sequoia Capital. Later that year, the company announced a $70 million Series B co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and ICONIQ, bringing total funding to more than $100 million.
That level of investor interest shows that major enterprise software investors believe accounting is ready for a new generation of tools. It also shows that Rillet is entering the conversation at the right moment. AI is changing expectations across business software, and finance teams are looking for systems that can help them work faster without sacrificing control.
Investors such as Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, ICONIQ, Oak HC/FT, and FOG Ventures give the company credibility, but the larger test is customer trust. Publicly mentioned customers and partners have included companies and firms such as Windsurf, Postscript, Armanino, and Wiss. Those names suggest that Rillet is not just building for a theoretical market. It is working with teams that deal with real accounting complexity.
What Rillet means for CFOs and controllers
For CFOs and controllers, the appeal of Rillet is practical.
A CFO wants to know what is happening in the business without waiting weeks for clean numbers. A controller wants a close process that does not depend on endless manual checks. Accounting teams want tools that reduce repetitive work while still supporting accuracy, controls, and auditability.
Rillet speaks directly to those needs.
If the platform can shorten close cycles, automate parts of reconciliation, improve financial visibility, and reduce spreadsheet dependency, it can make life easier for finance teams. It can also help leadership teams make decisions with more confidence.
The shift is especially important for mid-market and high-growth companies. These businesses are often too complex for basic accounting tools but not always eager to deal with heavy legacy ERP systems. They need something stronger than entry-level software, but they also want faster implementation, cleaner workflows, and a better day-to-day user experience.
That is the opening Rillet is trying to fill.
For controllers, the value is in fewer manual bottlenecks and better control over financial data. For CFOs, the value is in clearer visibility, faster reporting, and stronger support for planning and investor communication.
How Rillet fits into the rise of AI in finance
AI is moving deeper into finance operations, but accounting is not an area where companies can afford careless automation. The numbers have to be right. The workflows have to be controlled. The system has to explain what happened and why.
That is why Rillet’s AI-native approach is important.
AI can be useful in accounting when it is built on clean, structured financial data. It can help with tasks such as reconciliation, journal entry suggestions, variance analysis, accrual workflows, reporting, and document review. But the real value comes when AI is connected to the system of record rather than sitting outside the workflow as a separate assistant.
Rillet is part of a broader shift toward finance software that is more automated, more connected, and more real time. Instead of asking finance teams to copy data between systems and then use AI on top of the mess, the better path is to build a cleaner foundation first.
This does not mean accountants become less important. In many ways, it makes their judgment more valuable. AI can help reduce repetitive work, but finance teams still need to review, approve, interpret, and explain the numbers.
That is the more realistic future of AI in accounting: not replacement, but better leverage.
Why Nicolas Kopp’s work with Rillet matters
Nicolas Kopp is not building in an easy category. ERP software is hard because it touches the core financial operations of a company. It has to handle complexity, scale, trust, accuracy, and compliance. It also has to convince finance teams to change systems they may have used for years.
That makes Rillet’s mission ambitious.
The company is trying to challenge older accounting platforms by giving modern finance teams a faster and more intelligent alternative. Its focus on AI-native ERP, automated accounting workflows, real-time reporting, and general ledger modernization puts it in the middle of one of the biggest shifts in business software.
Kopp’s achievement is not just that he raised money or built another AI startup. The more meaningful story is that he is taking on a painful operational problem that many companies know well. Finance teams do not need more noise. They need systems that make the work cleaner, faster, and more reliable.
That is why Rillet has become a company worth watching.
Nicolas Kopp and the future of modern accounting software
The future of accounting software will likely look very different from the systems many companies still use today. Finance teams will expect faster closes, cleaner integrations, stronger automation, and more useful real-time reporting. CFOs will want financial data that supports decisions as they happen, not weeks after the fact.
Nicolas Kopp is building Rillet for that future.
His work sits at the intersection of fintech, accounting, AI, and enterprise software. That combination gives Rillet a strong narrative in a market that is ready for change. Legacy ERP systems are not going away overnight, but they will face growing pressure from tools that are faster to implement, easier to use, and built for AI from the start.
For modern finance teams, the biggest win is not simply having newer software. It is having a financial system that matches the speed of the business.
That is the opportunity Nicolas Kopp is chasing with Rillet. If the company succeeds, it could help redefine what accounting software looks like for the next generation of CFOs, controllers, and finance operators.
