Streamlining Business Accounting: Our Seed Investment in Quanta

We’re seeing the dawn of a new era in technology with AI breakthroughs being readily applied to existing software categories, driving increased efficacy and greater leverage. There are a few obvious applications that are attracting venture dollars: customer support, legal services, medical billing, and of course, accounting. Accounting has a number of intrinsic characteristics that make it ripe for disruption. Everyone needs it done, it’s currently largely manual, reliability and accuracy are paramount, and early-stage teams are too busy building their own business to dedicate a lot of energy towards this. It’s no surprise, therefore, then that the state-of-the-art is “good enough” outsourced accounting agencies that handle your bookkeeping, and this hasn’t really changed in quite some time.

Enter Quanta. Quanta is building an AI-native accounting engine from the ground up that integrates with all your sources of truth and completely automates the population of its general ledger, reducing human error and ensuring the accounting is performed according to a consistent policy. This is a breakthrough, and allows for a new model of real-time delivery of financial metrics and data, a far cry from extended close times and stale metrics devoid of their original context. Early customers are in Quanta multiple times per week, and have noted a dramatic increase in the usefulness of their finances. Quanta complements its software system with the very best human accounting talent to focus on strategic and creative accounting work – creating a hybrid, best-of-both model that shows great promise as a sustainable and pragmatic model for how these AI breakthroughs will be ultimately integrated.

Quanta was founded by Helen Hastings, who prior to this rose through the ranks at Affirm to become one of their leading engineers. She has a unique combination of razor sharp technical acumen, thoroughness of execution, and familiarity with this problem space from her time at Affirm that makes her stand out as a founder and best suited to solve this problem. I was first introduced to Helen through Sarah Ericson, a former colleague of mine at CardSpring and then at Twitter, a standout engineering leader in her own right. I see in Helen the same understated leadership and meticulous eye for detail that I witnessed up close in Sarah. Joining Helen is a talent-dense team of product engineers from Stripe, Affirm, among others, and Nic Malianni, who led accounting at Notion and Intercom before this.

I’m thrilled to announce today that Accel is leading Quanta’s seed financing, alongside our friends at Designer Fund and basecase as well as notable operators such as Michelle Valentine of Anrok and David Eckstein of Vanta. Helen has more to say about Quanta's vision here. You can also read more about their news in TechCrunch. Quanta joins a growing list of AI-powered application workflow companies that we have invested in, such as Decagon, Gamma, Ironclad, and several more that are unannounced. And in Quanta, we see the potential to unlock the same step-level change that we are seeing happen across the industry as this technology tidal wave continues to unfold.