London's Stacks raises $23M for agentic AI finance platform
London-based Stacks has closed a $23 million Series A funding round to expand its agentic AI platform for enterprise finance. The platform automates complex workflows such as accounts payable, reconciliation, and spend management using persistent AI agents. The funding highlights investor appetite for horizontal SaaS platforms with open integration capabilities.
- The £23 million Series A was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with existing investors EQT Ventures, General Catalyst, and S16VC also participating, bringing Stacks' total funding to $35 million. - Stacks' founder and CEO, Albert Malikov, previously held product leadership roles at Uber and Plaid, where he was involved in scaling Plaid's European operations. - The platform is designed to address fragmented financial data scattered across ERPs, spreadsheets, and legacy systems by creating a unified data layer, which then allows AI agents to automate workflows. - Customers have reported significant efficiency gains, including a 47% reduction in the time it takes to close their books and a 97% decrease in manual reconciliations. - Alongside the funding, Stacks launched a new tool called AI Flux Analysis, which automates variance analysis and generates explanations for financial fluctuations, a task often done manually in spreadsheets. - The investment in Stacks is part of a broader 2025-2026 trend of sustained venture capital flowing into enterprise AI platforms in Europe that focus on data infrastructure and automation. - In the adtech space, the deprecation of third-party cookies is forcing a shift toward privacy-preserving technologies like Google's Privacy Sandbox, though early data shows a roughly 30% drop in ad revenue for users without cookies, presenting significant measurement challenges. - A key trend in programmatic advertising is Supply Path Optimization (SPO), which aims to create more direct and transparent routes to ad inventory, reducing costs and ad fraud by eliminating unnecessary intermediaries.
