Five years ago, building a new ERP would have been a fool’s errand. Ask any CFO about their ERP vendor and you’ll be met with a heavy sigh – the products are unpleasant to use, devoid of innovation, and subject to price increases at every renewal. And yet incumbents thrived because they were simply too embedded to rip out without a clear enough benefit on the other side of the migration.

We are now on the other side, and it has become too costly to remain complacent.

What has motivated CFOs to make a change? AI has fundamentally transformed the role of the ERP. Instead of a static repository that finance teams query and reconcile manually, an AI ERP can automate mundane data entry and reconciliation, elevating its users to become strategic thinkers who process and engage with information in real time. In short, the books now talk back.

Rillet is built around three premises: deep context, real-time event-driven architecture, and user empathy.

Every integration goes deep rather than wide. Instead of bolting on shallow connectors, Rillet pulls data from the systems upstream of the ledger, including Stripe, Ramp, Salesforce, and the rest of the stack, with enough context attached that any number can be traced straight back to its source.

The ledger runs on events in real time, not a calendar. The moment a bill syncs or a payment clears, Rillet posts the journal entry, builds the schedule, and updates the balance in that same instant, rather than waiting for a batch job to catch up at month-end.

The third pillar, user empathy, is easiest to see in founder Nic Kopp himself. Nic pairs fluency in finance and accounting with intensity and product vision. Before founding Rillet, Nic was the U.S. CEO of N26, the fintech that convinced millions of people to trust a phone app with their life savings, something legacy banks insisted customers would never do. Before that, he spent five years in investment banking at Morgan Stanley and holds a master's in accounting from the London School of Economics. He understands the ledger from the perspectives of builders and accounting professionals. He paired that background with an exceptional technical team and a robust group of CPAs and finance operators with firsthand experience in the problem area.

As Nic puts it, "It used to be that you wouldn't get fired for choosing NetSuite. Now you get fired for failing to realize the benefits of AI."

With Rillet, CFOs have real time visibility to steer the business rather than report on its past, accounting teams gather the context they need to perform workflows traceably and in one place, and Rillet's agents are able to work directly with agents in connected systems.

At Bain Capital, we spend time with CFOs of companies of every size, from early startups to large, PE-backed companies. In conversations about the ERP market, disruption has become synonymous with Rillet. When we set out to make introductions across our portfolio, we were surprised to find how many companies were already customers, and how many large, mature companies were already considering adopting or partnering with Rillet on their own. The most consistent theme we heard from Rillet users is that the team deeply understands its customers: controllers and CFOs love that they are supported by accountants who speak their language and that the product feels like it was designed by people who have lived the close process.

The ERP market is at the start of a generational transition that is only possible because of AI. The systems that win as AI native ERPs have the opportunity not just to become the next generation of SAP, Oracle, Workday, and NetSuite, but to go further, eliminating a portion of the trillions of dollars companies spend on accounting and finance work. Rillet is building the winning system, a foundation for accounting superintelligence, where agents perform increasingly complex financial work and finance teams retain judgment, approval, and a complete audit trail. We are proud to partner with Nic and the Rillet team as part of the company's $100M Series C.