Why Iconiq Growth decided to be the lead investor in Vic.ai's $50 million Series B round

Repost from Iconiq Growth

WRITTEN BY WILL GRIFFITH AND VANESSA DENG | SEPTEMBER 1, 2021

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Vic.ai: Putting Accounting on Autopilot

We live in a world with self-driving cars, ubiquitous access to mobile computing, and space tourism on the horizon, yet accounting processes are shockingly antiquated. Alex Hagerup and Kris Roil hope to change that by building the next modern CFO platform. The two founded Vic.ai in 2017 with a bold vision of delivering AI to the office of the CFO, starting with a focus on accounts payable.

ICONIQ Growth is thrilled to partner with Vic.ai as the lead investor in their latest $50 million Series B financing, announced today (read about the company’s press release here). We are excited to support the company on their journey to augment and transform how enterprise finance teams and accountants work.

Having been investors and partners to many leading companies in financial software, we deeply resonated with the problem Vic.ai is tackling. We knew first-hand how manual and error-prone it is to enter, tag, and categorize invoices in the general ledger, and then send them for review, wait for approval, and finally make payments. Surprisingly, most accounting teams still do not have fully automated invoice-processing capabilities and spend significant time and resources on manual data entry and categorization.

No software has accomplished truly automating this time- and labor-intensive process, so when we first met Alex, we were very intrigued to understand what Vic.ai could deliver.

When we saw the product in action, we were immediately blown away by the extent of Vic.ai’s autonomous capabilities. The co-founders and enthusiastic customers showed us live demos of how Vic.ai ingested and processed invoices. Its core AI engine captured the correct data fields and made intelligent decisions on behalf of accountants, such as accurately picking expense categories.

With every decision that gets validated, the system becomes smarter and more customized for each customer. Over time, we believe Vic.ai can achieve over 95% accuracy with this powerful flywheel, resulting in significant cost savings especially for high-volume enterprise customers.

Building this innovative engine undoubtedly took time and grit. For years, the Vic.ai team trained its AI models with high-quality proprietary data consisting of invoices that were audited and correctly categorized. The result has been astonishing — Vic.ai now processes invoices with a degree of automation and accuracy we believe is far ahead of competition and defying all expectations.

On top of the core AI engine, the team at Vic.ai has built out sophisticated approval workflows and integrations to further streamline companies’ back-office financial operations. Alex and Kris founded the company in Norway and had global ambitions from Day 1 — we are already seeing Vic.ai gaining traction in the US. We are excited to see Vic.ai continue to expand its enterprise offering to best serve its U.S. and European customers including HSB (Sweden’s largest real-estate management company), Intercom, KPMG, and PwC.

Invoice processing is just the first step. In the long term, the Vic.ai team has massive ambitions to automate all manual accounting processes and to bring intelligence to FP&A.

Alex once joked to us that he took the most difficult path to building an AI company. “We are AI purists,” he said. When you run into technological roadblocks, it is easy to fall back on rule-based logic or human intervention. It has been impressive to see Alex and his team’s unwavering drive to focus on perfecting the autonomous technology and the resulting product that we believe is truly groundbreaking and ready to scale.

The passion, energy, and humility Alex and the team at Vic.ai exhibited throughout our interactions is deeply inspiring. We are grateful to be a part of Vic.ai’s journey to reimagine enterprise accounting. Congratulations to Alex and the entire Vic.ai team!