AI Accounting Startups Are Fetching $1 Billion Valuations
Source: The Information, Julia Hornstein
Photo: Courtesy of Rillet
Fast growth at AI startups like Mercor and Replit is also boosting the fortunes of startups that help them balance their books.
Rillet, which makes AI-powered accounting software it sells to other companies, said Tuesday it has raised $100 million in a funding round led by returning investor Iconiq, valuing Rillet at $1 billion. And rival Campfire has received offers to invest at a $1 billion valuation, according to a person with knowledge of the business.
The three-year-old Campfire may take one of those offers but has yet to dip into the $65 million it raised in October 2025 from Accel, Ribbit Capital and others, the person added.
Unicorn valuations are much higher than the prices set at their last funding rounds. Campfire was valued at $375 million in October 2025, according to the publication This Week in Fintech. The company has said it’s trained an AI model on accounting data.
Rillet, which came out of stealth mode two years ago, was one of The Information’s 50 most promising startups in November 2025, when it had a valuation of $500 million, and is backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital. Fortune first reported on its latest funding round.
Both companies tout AI-powered software that allows customers to reconcile accounts and create financial reports more quickly than legacy systems. The companies, which charge customers an annual subscription fee, are trying to snare a piece of business spending from Intuit’s QuickBooks, Oracle’s Netsuite and Sage’s Intacct. Executives recently attended a roundtable discussion with expense and card startup Ramp at Jefferies’ annual software conference for chief financial officers in New York last week.
Rillet and Campfire have benefitted from fast growth at the AI startups they serve. Rillet customer Mercor, for instance, generated $614 million in gross revenue in the first half of the year, up 70% from all of last year. (Its net revenue after paying the contractors that do its data labeling is about one-third that amount.)
Campfire, for its part, counts coding assistant Replit and customer support assistant Decagon as customers.
It’s typical in a boom market for startups to piggyback off the growth and venture funding of other startups. That’s why these new accountancy startups will want to show they’ve attracted larger customers—preferably ones outside AI—as growth continues.
More than 40% of Rillet’s current customer base of about 600 comes from nontech companies including healthcare enterprises, CEO Nicolas Kopp tells us. Campfire also works with nontech companies, such as nonprofits and even cheese distributors, the person familiar with its business said.
One hurdle: Bigger businesses find it hard to switch their software providers when they have already stored their accounting information and financial data in one of the legacy providers, investors and bankers have said. Those providers, meanwhile, are also trying to add AI offerings to their products. The startups will be at pains to show they can win some of the blue-chip customers their more established rivals serve.
Here’s what else is going on:
The Justice Department is reportedly probing Andreessen Horowitz over two board seats in competing startups occupied by firm co-founder Ben Horowitz and partner Martin Casado, who leads the fund’s AI infrastructure practice.
We’re hearing that this probe may not be the last of its kind for venture capital firms, which have long made meaningful investments in startups that compete with one another. Some have gone so far as to take board roles on rival startups.
The investigation into Andreessen Horowitz’s board seats started almost a year ago, according to Bloomberg. That was around the same time as the agency’s review of Firetran’s acquisition of dbt Labs, a merger Valida first reported in September 2025. Casado served on the boards of dbt Labs and Fivetran, and Horowitz is on Databricks’ board. Databricks and Fivetran both sell services that help companies manage and move large quantities of data.
The probe invokes a law from the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 that prohibits “interlocking directorates,” or when individuals, or people from the same organization, sit on the boards of two companies that compete with each other.
It remains to be seen just how expansive a definition of competition the Justice Department will use if it takes up other investigations like this one.
Andreessen Horowitz didn’t respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the Justice Department said, “We can affirm that the DOJ under the Trump administration will continue to prioritize affordability for all Americans across our economy,” but didn’t clarify how the probe aims to address that concern.
Founders have historically been leery about firms whose partner already sits on the board of their fiercest rival. Famously, Sequoia Capital relinquished its board seat in fintech Finix in 2020 when it invested in Stripe. Still, this most recent investment cycle seemed to have eroded the taboo on investing in competitors. An antitrust probe could change that.