Neno raises €6.6 million to build AI-native financial services for Europe's SMEs

Why AI-native services, and why now

We're thesis-driven at Neno. Conviction comes from three places, and we pressure-test every decision against them:

1. The team. Do they bring domain scars, experience that comes from having actually solved this problem before, not just studied it? On top of that: hunger to win, urgency to deliver, and the rigor to know why something worked or didn't, not just that it did.

2. Market dynamics. Who's tried this before and failed, and why? What's structurally different about our wedge,  model, sequencing, or timing that lets us succeed where they didn't? And concretely: who are we taking share from today? And where can we draw more from? 

3. Market timing. The one lever we don't have absolute control over but have to read correctly: regulatory shifts (AI Act, EU accounting reform), the accountant talent shortage, and AI crossing the threshold from "assists the work" to "does the work.

Our thesis-led approach has been thematic. First, the “messy business problem”: entrepreneurs are still stuck juggling 5+ tools to manage back-office admin, which is arguably still true today, but when zooming out, we identified our second thesis, "The broken middle." 

More than half of Europe's 26 million SMEs are stuck in the broken middle, outsourcing accounting, payroll, and tax to a professional services industry worth roughly €200 billion a year concentrated among businesses with 10 to 100 employees, and trying to run a business built on accounting software last updated in the early 2000’s that was never built for them in the first place. It's a five-decade-old operating model, and it has quietly compounded into a real problem: fragmented workflows across banking, accounting, tax, and payroll fail to produce contextual financial insight, while a structural shortage of accountants has made the old accountant-to-client ratio mathematically unsustainable. 

You can't hire your way out of a talent shortage that's getting worse every year. All this leads to millions of European business owners frustrated with outdated software, relying on an external accountant who shows up after the fact, sending an invoice for work that now feels completely unjustifiable. This is when we knew timing, talent and technology was on our side. For now.

One agentic system of record

We never wanted to become a wrapper on top of someone else's data, that's easy and not defensible in my opinion. You need to go after the hard stuff, the ledger. The spinal cord of a company's financial data. Once you own that, you can become the cortex. Neno addresses this with an AI-native workspace built around a real-time agentic general ledger (AGL), a system that unifies and contextualizes transactional data from business bank accounts, corporate cards, bill payments, and receivables into a single source of truth. It continuously learns from that data to deliver reconciliation and VAT preparation five times faster for our in-house accountants, saving customers an average of 8 hours of admin a month and 20% on annualized accounting fees.

So instead of business owners coordinating between banks, bookkeepers, and tax advisors, we deliver a single 'done-for-you' state of work, where reconciliation, compliance, and reporting happen automatically in the background. The business owner's only touchpoint is reviewing what's already been handled, on time, not 6 weeks after the fact, and whenever they need to speak to a Neno accountants, it’s directly on Slack or WhatsApp, and they don’t get charged for it. 

What our investors are betting on and why 

I mention timing is critical, and often out of your control and yes it's helpful that all three of my investors have extensively explored AI-native services dating back to publications in August 2024 but the category itself is still very early. It’s like investing in early cloud companies when on-premise wasn't sexy anymore but no-one understood the scale of what was possible when backing a category leader early. 

Luc Ryan-Schreiber, our investor and now board member from AlleyCorp said it like it is: "AI-native financial infrastructure with embedded professional services is one of the most compelling opportunities in modern fintech today. Neno is reengineering the role of accountants and tax advisors, disrupting a fifty-year-old professional services model. The team's domain depth, and their ability to become a category leader in AI-native financial services, were the deciding factors for us."

Hugo Bongers, Partner at Motive Partners aligned to a similar thesis: "Finished work in AI-native financial services is exactly the category we're excited about. Executing on it requires a team that understands both the technology and the profession, and Neno's team, drawn from Adyen, Mollie, Plaid, and Big Four firms including Deloitte, EY and BDO, delivers on both fronts."

Lorcan Delaney, Partner at Firstminute Capital: "Europe's accounting and tax landscape is fragmented by design, different rules, filings, and formats in every market. That complexity has kept the incumbent model safe for decades, and it's exactly what an agentic general ledger is built to absorb. Nick and the team pair deep B2B fintech and Big Four experience with real AI depth to execute on that vision."

My biggest learning from understanding how to use my time most effectively when raising is finding the investors who actually understand what you are doing, what it takes to become a category builder and winner and what trade-offs you may have to make getting there. These teams lean in heavily when needed, ask us the hard questions and give us the space to do what we set out to do. Any founder backed by any of these investors will succeed.

An accounting capacity multiplier

At its core, the SME accounting crisis is a capacity problem. Accountants are running client books on software built for a slower, more manual era, software that caps how many clients any one person can serve well. We're building Neno's AI infrastructure, Atlas AI, to remove that ceiling by giving our accountants far richer, contextualized transaction data to work from instead of a shoebox of receipts and a login to five different tools.

We’re not here to replace accountants, quite the opposite. We significantly expand their capacity enabling a single Neno accountant to manage hundreds of customers instead of the traditional thirty, without compromising on advisory quality or responsiveness.

Commercial model

The two complaints we hear most often from entrepreneurs: their fees are unclear and unpredictable, and the value they get back from their accountant doesn't justify the cost. Managing the back office today means paying for invoicing software, accounting software, business banking, and separate advisory fees, on top of the hours business owners burn doing admin themselves. Some tell us that's up to 12 hours a month, and they're still paying an external accountant on top. We collapse that from six tools into one, and every pricing plan includes a free local business bank account, Mastercard spend cards and custom-branded quote and invoicing solutions. No more €4K per year fees to spend management platforms or invoicing tools. 

As an AI-native services business, we track ourselves against five metrics, because software companies watch usage, and services companies watch delivery, we have to watch both:

1. Customer satisfaction: why customers choose Neno, and what it takes to make them stay and refer others.

2. Engineering velocity: what a team of 8 engineers ships today looks nothing like what 8 engineers shipped even a year ago, and we build to keep widening that gap.

3. Average revenue per accountant: the clearest signal establishing how our tooling is making each Neno accountant more valuable, not just busier.

4. Average customers per accountant: capacity is the whole thesis, so this is the number that tells us AI is doing its job of amplifying, not just assisting.

5. Average time to close: how fast we can take a new customer from signing to live, since a five-decade-old industry doesn't get to keep five-decade-old onboarding timelines. 

Traction

Since launching in Q1, we've onboarded some of the Netherlands' fastest-growing SaaS, ecommerce, agency, and horeca brands including: SOUS, Airweave, Rally, FeedbackFruits, SKUU, Rosel, Scarpetta, The Cirqle, Manna, Novem and Rime Finance.

Revenue continues to grow 60% month-on-month with a pipeline we can't close fast enough. We run a direct-to-business model that gets customers migrated and live in under 5 days. ACVs currently range from €10K to €180K, with a payback period of under 7 months, the kind of unit economics that tell us the direction of travel based on our customer size and sales cycle can support an outbound motion, not just inbound demand. The best signal any business can index to for repeatable growth is customer referrals, which today account for more than 70% of new business. On the back of that, we're planning a significant investment into the Dutch commercial team in Q4 2026 and Q2 2027, built around highly personalized, localized GTM engineering and partner integrations. 

Neno Labs

Neno Labs is our AI Research & Progression (AIRP) team, funded directly from this round. It sits adjacent to Product & Engineering but runs its own OKRs, deliberately kept out of the sprint cycle and roadmap pressure of the core product team. The internal comparison we use is a special-forces unit: small, elite, autonomous, built to move fast on one hard problem and answer to its own mission rather than a shared backlog.

Its mandate: Ambient AI, the stage beyond the agentic systems we already run in production.

Neno's product today unifies business banking, cards, bill payments, bookkeeping, tax, and payroll into a single system of record. AI agents handle reconciliation and tax categorization; in-house accountants review and approve the output before it's final. That's the agentic phase: the system executes on request and checks in with a human before completing it.

AIRP exists to build the next phase. Ambient AI doesn't wait to be asked, it continuously monitors a business's finances and acts on its own, within the pre-defined guardrails set by our customers and reviewed by our accountants, surfacing a decision to a human only when it requires judgment a machine shouldn't make alone or a customer isn't comfortable with. As every customer has their own risk threshold, the same way they utilize credit lines or create AR/AP spend controls. 

What this looks like in practice:

• Cash flow: Agentic AI produces a forecast when asked. Ambient AI recalculates it the moment a large invoice lands, and only alerts the owner if it changes what they can afford, for example, flagging that a new hire is now affordable and offering scenarios or applying for an indicative credit line ready to deploy on predefined terms. 

• Tax: Agentic AI files VAT on schedule when instructed. Ambient AI updates the live tax provision continuously as transactions happen, so nothing needs reconciling at quarter-end.

• Bill payments: Agentic AI pays invoices when told to. Ambient AI detects a new bill in the owner's inbox and pays it on agreed terms without being asked, unless the amount or terms fall outside pre-set thresholds.

• Aging receivables: Agentic AI follows up with automated reminders and payment links. Ambient AI calls your customers on your behalf, asking them why their payment is late and taking action to resend a payment link on the call or forwarding the late payment to a debtor's collection.  

Vision for 2030

The Netherlands is our home market, and it stays that way, the market we win, defend and prove repeatability in before we invest in geo-expansion. Additional EU market expansion follows in the second half of 2027 with markets we like due to either similar accounting practices, progressively digitized tax authorities, established e-invoicing mandates, or being large enough to continue building a dominant market leader. UK, Belgium, Italy, and Spain all present these qualities as the next wave of European SME expansion markets.

What's interesting is that we’re already seeing a pull we didn't ask for: SaaS businesses with US and UK entities asking us to consolidate their bookkeeping and taxes under one administration. That's a GTM motion we like, international growth that doesn't require us to build out capital-heavy GTM and engineering ahead of demand, because it grows from inside an already established ecosystem we already have and others, for whatever reason, can't confidently service. 

Our ambition is to become a global AI-native financial services business operating across four continents in four years: Europe, Africa, Asia, and the US, positioning Neno as the cross-border partner for SMEs that larger auditing firms won't serve because of pricing sensitivity and resourcing, and that smaller legacy accounting firms can't serve because they don't have the technical capability to be one.

We're early. There's a ton to learn. But the path is clear: we're in a healthy cash position with a route to profitability, and we've got investors and customers backing us in equal measure. Getting to do this every day with the team I have around me is a true blessing. I take nothing for granted, and I don't plan on stopping any time soon.