Integral raises €18m Series A led by Mosaic Ventures and Reid Hoffman to build the AI-native accounting, tax and payroll services firm for SMEs
Today we are announcing our €18m Series A, co-led by Mosaic Ventures and Reid Hoffman, with our existing investors Cherry Ventures, General Catalyst and Puzzle Ventures joining again. It brings the total capital raised by Integral to more than €30m, less than two years after Anil and I sat in a small office in Berlin and decided to start this company.
A press release went out this morning. It has the numbers, the quotes and the usual content. This post is the part we could not fit into a press release: why we started, what we have learned from the people who actually do this work every day and what we intend to do with the trust that a lot of people have just placed in us.
Where this started
Before Integral, we spent years building banking and payments for businesses. We talked to thousands of founders and one thing came up in almost every conversation, usually with a sigh. It was never the product, never the market, never the team. It was the paperwork. The monthly bookkeeping that was three months behind. The payroll run that depended on one person remembering to send a spreadsheet. The annual accounts that turned every spring into a scramble. The tax advisor who was excellent, overworked and difficult to reach.
Everyone treated this as a fact of life. We started to wonder why.
The answer we kept arriving at was uncomfortable. Software doesn't file your business's taxes. It doesn't run your payroll and it doesn't sign your annual accounts. A licensed professional does. And every year there are fewer of them. Firms turn down new clients because they cannot find people. Founders wait weeks for their books because the person who has to check them is buried in repetitive work. A whole generation of founders has quietly accepted that the most sensitive part of their business, the part that can get them in real trouble, runs on a backlog.
We did not think that was an acceptable status quo. And we did not think another dashboard would fix it, because the constraint was never the tooling.
Our approach
So we made a decision early on that still shapes everything we do. Instead of building yet another tool for professionals, we built a platform designed from day one to run an entire licensed practice and Integral Tax, an affiliated licensed professional services firm, runs on it end to end.
It means the people who build the AI agents and the people who sign the filings work on the same problem, look at the same scenarios and argue about the same edge cases. When a professional at Integral Tax corrects a posting or overrides a suggestion, that correction does not disappear into a support ticket. It goes straight back into the platform and the system benefits from it. Every review by a licensed professional makes the automation deeper. Every deepening of the automation gives the professionals more time for the work only they can do.
We wrote that loop on a whiteboard in our first month. Watching it work in real life has been the most satisfying part of the last two years. There is still lots of work to be done, but we fundamentally believe that we have to take the most difficult path: building the entire technology stack ourselves, end-to-end. With technology changing by the hour nowadays, we want to be in the position to implement changes very quickly and not having torely on third-party vendors for the key workflows.
What actually happens today
The AI agents reconcile invoices and bank transactions, prepare account postings, prepare payroll runs and prepare tax filings. That is the volume work that used to fill most of a professional's day. The licensed professionals at Integral Tax do what they became professionals to do: they exercise judgment, catch the cases that do not fit the pattern and take responsibility for what goes out. Nothing reaches a client or an authority without a person who is legally accountable for it.
Since the beginning of this year, the professionals at Integral Tax have doubled the number of clients each of them can serve. We can already see that for many clients, the monthly accounting turnaround has gone from weeks to hours. And the professionals stay in full control, reviewing and signing every filing. But this is just the start. From a first principles perspective, this entire industry will fundamentally change.
For a founder, that changes the feeling of the whole relationship. The books can become current instead of chronically behind. Payroll runs on time without anyone chasing anyone. Questions get answered by someone who has time to think about them. Compliance stops being a project you manage and becomes a service you can forget about, in the best sense.
Why we believe this is bigger than accounting
We think of Integral as one of the first companies in a new category: AI-native services. Not companies that sell software to service providers, but companies that deliver the outcome itself, rebuilt from the ground up on AI.
The distinction matters more than it might seem. A software vendor is always limited by how its customers work, how their people adopt the product and how much of the workflow they are willing to hand over. When you build a group that contains both the technology and the licensed service, those limits can be dealt with differently. The platform and the practice are designed to complement each other. What the agents do, where the professionals step in, how every correction flows back: these are one set of decisions made by teams working together.
People often tell us that regulation is the reason AI will struggle in this industry. We have come to see it the other way round. Professional secrecy, licensing and personal liability tell you precisely where a human has to sit in the process. That clarity is a gift. It means you can automate everything around that point with confidence, because you know exactly what must never be automated. A model built to that standard from the first day, with accountable professionals and an architecture designed to fit this industry's requirements, never has to retrofit trust. Trust is part of the design, and the design gets stronger with every case that runs through it.
Our new investor Reid Hoffman put it like this:
"AI's real promise is amplifying what people can do, not replacing them. Integral shows what that looks like in one of the most regulated, trust-dependent industries there is: agents that multiply the reach of licensed professionals, so every small business gets the kind of financial expertise once reserved for large corporations. That's the pattern the next decade of professional services will follow and Lukas and Anil are building it where the bar is highest: Germany."
We started in one of the most demanding accounting and tax regimes in the world. If the model works where the bar is highest, it works anywhere. And the problem it solves, too few licensed professionals for too many businesses that need them, is the same across Europe.
The people who joined us
With Mosaic Ventures, the conversation moved past the software framing within minutes and into the things we actually care about: how agents and professionals share the work, how you keep quality high as automation deepens, what the economics look like three years out. They asked the questions our own team asks. Chandar Lal, Partner at Mosaic Ventures, summed up why they invested:
"With AI, it's possible to rebuild industries from the ground up, not just sell better software. In accounting, tax and payroll, the need is obvious as labour shortages are only getting worse. Integral is uniquely well positioned to solve that problem in Germany and beyond."
Reid Hoffman has spent years arguing that AI should make people more capable rather than make them redundant. We believe that’s the right way to think about it. It is the operating principle of the entire model and it is what the professionals at Integral Tax experience every day. Having Reid co-lead this round alongside Mosaic means a great deal to us personally and it says something about where the next chapter of AI is heading: into the services themselves.
And then there are the investors who were here before any of this was obvious. Cherry Ventures, General Catalyst and Puzzle Ventures backed us early and again increased their commitment in this round.
What we will do with it
The Series A does three things.
First, it lets us take automation deeper across every workflow, from the moment a client signs up to the platform and requires bookkeeping, payroll runs and tax filings. We have shown that agents can prepare books end to end. The next step is bringing that depth to the more complex accounting, tax and payroll cases that today take significant professional time today.
Second, it lets us hire. Integral only works when three very different kinds of people work together: AI engineers who build and train the agents, licensed professionals who review and sign the results and the commercial teams that bring the service to the businesses who need it. Building a culture where an engineer and a tax professional argue productively about the same edge case is one of the hardest things we do. It is also the thing we are proudest of.
Third, it lets us build what comes next. Accounting, tax and payroll were the obvious place to start, because the pain is universal and the shortage of professionals is most acute. But they are the foundation, not the ceiling. Excited things in the pipeline to come soon!
If any of this sounds like you
Announcements like this are usually written for customers and the press. This one is also written for the people we want to work with.
If you are an engineer who wants to build AI that does real work with real consequences, we would love to talk. Most AI products today are judged on whether the output looks plausible. Ours are judged on whether a licensed professional is willing to put their name under them and whether the tax authorities accept them. It is a harder standard and a much more interesting one. Because it has a real, measurable impact on the lives of businesses.
If you are a licensed tax professional who is tired of spending your days on work a machine should be doing and who wants to practise at the level your qualification actually allows, we would love to talk too.
And if you are a founder who would like to stop thinking about compliance paperwork and get back to building, we would like to show you what accounting, tax and payroll can feel like.
Thank you
Nearly two years ago, Anil and I started Integral with a conviction: the future of professional services would not come from selling better software to the existing industry, but from rebuilding the industry itself. Today that conviction has more than €30m, a growing team and some of the people we admire most behind it.
To our clients: thank you for your trust. To our teams who make this model real every single day: this round is a validation of you. And to everyone who believes that AI should amplify what people can do rather than replace them: we are building the proof and we would love for you to be part of it.
Lukas Zörner, Co-Founder and CEO and Anil Can Baykal, Co-Founder and CTO