DataSnipper NV, a startup using artificial intelligence to make accounting professionals more productive, today announced that it has closed a $100 million funding round led by Index Ventures.

The investment values the Amsterdam-based software maker at $1 billion. It follows a year in which DataSnipper doubled both its revenue and customer base. According to the company, its software is now used by more than 500,000 accounting professionals in 125 countries.

Enterprises verify the accuracy of their financial statements by hiring external auditors to check that all the accounting information on file is correct. DataSnipper provides an AI platform, also called DataSnipper, that can help external auditors carry out their work more efficiently. The company says its platform compresses tasks that usually require hours of work into a few seconds.

Financial statements often take the form of Excel spreadsheets. A company might, for example, have a spreadsheet that centrally tracks all the business expenses incurred in the past quarter. The individual expenses are typically organized in separate rows.

External auditors verify the accuracy of a financial statement by comparing it against a company’s other documents. For instance, each business expense listed in a spreadsheet may have a corresponding receipt. Auditors compare each expense against the corresponding receipt to check that the sums match up.

DataSnipper’s platform uses AI to speed up the process. When an external auditor selects an expense in a financial statement, the platform automatically finds the corresponding receipt or other relevant document. it then makes that document available through a sidebar embedded into the Excel interface, which allows auditors to quickly check that all the sums match.

The company says its platform can significantly speed up so-called tests of details. Those are initiatives in which auditors check that the individual items contained within a financial statement are accurate. DataSnipper also promises to ease tests of controls, which focus on checking that the workflows through which a company produces its financial statements are accurate.

“Half the world is creating more data than ever before, half the world needs to verify it – that’s the premise of the entire economy,” said Chief Executive Officer Vidya Peters (pictured, second from left). “DataSnipper lies at the intersection.”

Accounting teams sometimes require the ability to extract financial information from business documents into a spreadsheet. An auditor might, for example, wish to create a spreadsheet that tracks the value of recent merchandise purchases made by a retailer. Creating such spreadsheets historically involved a significant amount of manual work.

Alongside its financial statement verification features, DataSnipper provides a tool that automates the task of loading data into spreadsheets. It allows auditors to select the sections of a document from which they wish to extract information via a drag-and-drop interface. From there, the tool automatically loads data from the selected fields into a spreadsheet.

DataSnipper says its platform’s features are useful for not only external auditors but also other financial professionals. Using the funding round announced today, the company will work to broaden the adoption of its platform among internal auditors, tax advisers, forensic accountants and other knowledge workers. Additionally, DataSnipper plans to expand its market presence in the Asia Pacific region and Latin America. 

Photo: Index Ventures