London's Stacks raises over £17M for agentic finance AI
London-based Stacks has secured a Series A round, reported as both £17 million and $23 million, to expand its agentic AI platform for enterprise finance. The company uses AI agents to automate back-office functions like reconciliation, accounts payable, and spend management. The funding highlights investor interest in horizontal SaaS platforms that leverage AI agents for workflow automation.
- The Series A round was led by Lightspeed, with participation from existing investors EQT Ventures, General Catalyst, and S16VC. Stacks' founder and CEO, Albert Malikov, was previously a product leader at both Uber and Plaid. - For its more than 30 enterprise clients, including Volt, Motorway, and Cleo, Stacks reports reducing month-end close cycles by as much as 50% and saving finance teams over 100,000 hours annually. The company is now launching a new AI Flux Analysis tool to automate variance analysis and reporting. - Agentic AI, unlike traditional automation, uses autonomous agents built on large language models (LLMs) to perceive, plan, and execute complex financial workflows that are prone to exceptions, such as invoice reconciliation. In some deployments, this has reduced reconciliation times from days to hours and error rates to below 1%. - The transition from a hands-on engineering lead to a strategic CTO at a scaling B2B SaaS company involves shifting focus from writing code to managing managers, setting architectural direction, and aligning the technology roadmap with go-to-market strategy and pricing models. The CTO's involvement becomes critical in fundraising discussions to provide technical depth and ensure alignment with the CEO's business plan. - In the UK programmatic advertising market, where display ad spending is approaching 96% automation, the primary growth areas are now Connected TV (CTV) and digital-out-of-home (DOOH). Advertisers are increasingly using AI not just for targeting but also for the dynamic creative optimization of ad content in real time. - London's tech ecosystem, which accounts for the majority of the UK's tech value, saw Enterprise Applications lead sector funding in 2025 with $9 billion raised, while the previously dominant FinTech sector cooled. The UK maintained its position as the second-highest funded country for technology globally in 2025, trailing only the United States. - In Formula 1, teams are conducting the final pre-season test in Bahrain, with a focus on understanding the new car regulations for the upcoming season. Discussions continue around the significant 2026 power unit and chassis rule changes, with teams like Ferrari testing radical new aerodynamic concepts, including a rotating active rear wing.
