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Receipt Bank hits $50m investment jackpot

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20th Jul 2017
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Cloud bookkeeping add-on developer Receipt Bank has received a $50m Series B funding injection, which will spearhead the software company's artificial intelligence development.

The investment from Insight Venture Partners builds on Receipt Bank’s first shot in the arm from Kennet Partners eighteen months ago, which added $10m to the fund. This recent round of investment has increased the firm’s total funding amount to $65m.

According to Receipt Bank’s CEO Alexis Prenn, the investment will enable the UK firm to develop its patent-pending technologies and help accountants and bookkeepers provide value-added services to their small business clients.

Welcoming Receipt Bank to the Insight Venture Partners portfolio, Brad Twohig, the partners’ managing director, commented on how artificial intelligence (AI) has become a “clear disrupter” in financial services, with the bookkeeping cloud add-on being the industry leader in emerging tech.

The investment

Receipt Bank claims to have the largest AI team working anywhere in the world on bookkeeping. With some AI technology already visible and used by practices, and others in development, Receipt Bank’s co-founder Michael Wood told AccountingWEB that this investment will allow the software company to bring those new products to market and enhance its R&D team.

“All of [the artificial intelligence features being developed] have the same aim, and that is how do we help accountants and bookkeepers to become ever more efficient in their bookkeeping and to make more and more use of the bookkeeping data to improve the service for their clients,” he said. 

“We've got a whole raft of projects: products in the market, projects in development and ideas we'd like to develop – and they’ve all pointing to the same aim. And this money does give us much more bandwidth to build and release those.” 

Wood also stressed that the investment will cater for less sexy but equally important services to its partners and clients, such as security.

“Security is important and it's actually really expensive,” said Wood. “We have a whole team dedicated to the security of our clients’ data. That's a really important area of investment that we continue to invest more and more in.”

Artificial intelligence

Artificial Intelligence has progressed significantly over the last five years. Michael Wood told AccountingWEB at Accountex how just seven years ago Receipt Bank relied totally on manual labour to review the data extraction from receipts, invoices, credit notes and incoming documents. But three or four years ago, AI changed everything.

“When we started out our typical turnaround for a document was seven days. We now measure it minutes, and in certain cases it’s measured in seconds. That’s all AI working behind the scenes.”

Going forward, AI will continue to influence software development from this point onwards. “Every year from now on we’re going to see two or three major developments that will change bookkeeping. It’s going to move fast,” Wood told us at Accountex.

The future of AI

While Wood was reluctant to reveal what AI developments Receipt Bank has planned, he did tease that “bookkeeping will mean something different in five years’ time”.

“In five years’ time, bookkeeping as a word will be much more associated with the value of the data. Whether that is used to enable lending, whether that's used to enable real-time reporting, whether that's used to enable real-time accounting, there will be all sorts of applications that are going to come from bookkeeping data.

“It's going to make bookkeeping a very exciting and very valuable thing, and something small businesses will value far more than they do today.”

AccountingWEB’s take

The fact Receipt Bank has raised $50m shows the interest swirling around the AI gold mine at the moment.

This announcement provides a glimpse into not just Receipt Bank’s plans, but the software world as a whole. This investment rubber stamps AI, and for accountants and their clients, the roadmap going forward is pretty clear: AI is here to stay.

Seeing how technology has fundamentally changed the way Receipt Bank extracts data, replacing manual labour with AI, Wood’s closing words from Accountex should be a wakeup call for any accountant still relying on desktop technology: “The key thing that I would urge firms to do is make sure your clients are in the cloud…so they and you can benefit from it.”

You can watch the full Accountex interview with Michael Wood below. 

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By Jack Spratt
21st Jul 2017 11:15

These are the people who keep sending me what look like amateur spam emails but which get through my spam filter. They all come from different email addresses so blocking them doesn't kill them off and unsubscribing doesn't seem to have any effect.
"The key thing that I would urge them to do is to sort out their mailing list and take me off it"

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