AI bookkeeping startup Botkeeper secures $18 million to grow its engineering, sales, and marketing team

Closing the books at the quarter end, managing invoices and categorizing expenses involve a wide array of complex tasks that are both laborious and prone to human error. A three-year old artificial intelligence startup, Botkeeper, is on a mission to save organizations time and money by automating their bookkeeping operations and workflows through their human-assisted AI platform. Think of botkeeper as your assigned and dedicated permanent bookkeeper.

Today, the Boston, MA-based Botkeeper announced an $18 million series A funding round to grow across engineering, sales, and marketing. This is one of its largest A rounds for a Boston tech startup company that currently supports nearly 1000 companies. The latest round brings the total capital raised to date to $22.5 million. This round of financing is unique not only for its size but also for the names of some notable investors: Greycroft and Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI-focused venture fund. Existing investors, including Ignition Partners and Halfcourt Ventures, also participated for the second time in the highly sought after round. Other notable participants in the round include Sorenson Capital, Julian Brodsky, CPA Founder and CFO of Comcast and later Comcast Ventures, Stephen Messer, AI founder of Linkshare and Collective[i], Mike Volpe, former CMO of Hubspot and current CEO at Lola, Boston VC Jeff Fagnan, partner at Accomplice, and professional basketball player Matthew Dellavedova.

Founded in 2015 by Enrico Palmerino, Botkeeper provides businesses with a powerful combination of skilled accountants and automated data entry through the use of machine learning and AI. This is not the first Enrico startup company. At 22 years old, Enrico Palmerino sold his first company ThinkLite and bought himself a Maserati. Botkeeper clients receive 24/7 accounting and support as well as incredible insight into their financials with beautiful dashboards and unlimited reporting. With botkeeper, companies can grow from 0 to 100+ employees and on average save 50% compared to the cost of a bookkeeper or outsourced firm.

In step with the exciting growth, Botkeeper adds Chris Mahl as Chief Revenue Officer and Executive Vice President. Chris joins botkeeper with an impressive track record of heading sales and strategy for companies resulting in the following: Two public exits, (Informatica and Salesforce), two M&A exit (RightMedia, LevelUp), as well as several other companies he had taken to 10X in growth (Oracle and JW Player). “The industry-leading combination of human, artificial intelligence and scale botkeeper delivers is reinventing the accounting experience. Botkeeper system drives the reactive and inaccurate to proactive, precise and predictive… at any scale,” Mahl said.

Botkeeper has its roots in Founder Enrico Palmerino’s experiences running an accounting business, where he saw firsthand the pain points business owners face in managing the books. “At Botkeeper we’re focused on bringing simplicity and dependability to the bookkeeping process, so business owners can focus on running their business,” says Enrico.

Botkeeper’s AI-driven platform helps automate common bookkeeping workflows, provides answers to client questions, and can request more info when necessary much the same way a regular bookkeeper would. The platform easily integrates with a client’s banks, credit cards, HR system, and POS system, and makes appropriate entries and adjustments to their Quickbooks or Xero accounts. “Botkeeper’s system provides businesses with a 24/7 AI-driven botkeeper, coupled with human bookkeepers who can jump in and help when necessary,” Enrico said.

“Botkeeper has built a solution capable of supporting companies of all shapes and sizes- startups through Fortune 5000 companies. After hearing raving reviews from clients at both ends of the spectrum, it was obvious that botkeeper had pulled it off,” said Mark Terbeek, Partner at Greycroft. “We quickly decided that we needed Botkeeper ourselves, and needless to say, we saw the value overnight. Every company needs great bookkeeping, but all too often we see companies who still struggle to get it done right. We are thrilled to partner with a world-class company like botkeeeper that can get it right- every time.”

“Machine learning is transforming key workflows across accounting, and Botkeeper represents the future of AI-assisted bookkeeping. We’re excited to work with Botkeeper in helping make this process easier, efficient, and more accurate for accounting professionals,” said Gradient Ventures Partner Muzzammil “MZ” Zaveri. “In the coming years, we expect AI to play an increasingly larger role in automating accounting and compliance functions.”

Botkeeper Founder and CEO, Enrico Palmerino (Source: Botkeeper)