Accel-KKR announced a majority equity investment in Aico Group, an end-to-end financial close software platform for large enterprises. With this funding, Accel-KKR will join current investor Juuri Partners as Aico’s backers.
With this funding round, Aico will seek to support its market expansion across Europe, especially in the DACH region, and continue to develop and strengthen its financial close platform. And the company currently serves leading European enterprise customers like AkzoNobel, International Airlines Group (IAG), Syngenta, Outokumpu, SKF, and other companies in the Fortune 500.
Aico’s end-to-end SaaS platform addresses complex, multi-national, and multi-ERP back-office configurations with tight integration to these systems. And Aico stands out against other players in the market due to its configurability, which makes Aico’s platform adaptive to its enterprise clients’ complex environments and needs, its user-friendly single platform approach, and a unique ability to push and pull data in real-time to other systems, including ERPs. This means businesses gain quicker and more accurate financial close. Accounting teams gain more transparency and control over their workflow and have time to focus on more strategic work.
Juuri Partners invested in Aico in 2016. Over the last few years, it has worked with Aico to expand across Europe, including the UK and Germany, to support growth in these markets. Since Juuri Partners’ funding, Aico has built a strong international footprint and expanded its ARR base almost tenfold.
Last year, data from Aico’s platform showed that a typical large customer’s accounting team uses Aico to process 500,000 documents yearly, saving over 6,000 hours of work time. And Aico prevents thousands of errors in financial journals. Aico also determined that accounting teams need to produce 2-3x more documents in November and December than during the rest of the year, highlighting the need for automated closing task managers, account reconciliations, intercompany invoicing, and journal entries.
KEY QUOTES:
“We have come a long way with Juuri, from a business focused mainly on the local Finnish market to a truly multi-national enterprise SaaS company. I have valued the systematic, hands-on, open, and constructive cooperation with the Juuri team. I am truly excited to have the deep software experience that Accel-KKR will bring to support our management team. We are very pleased to have two experienced growth investors advancing our journey to become a major player in the financial close automation market.”
– Marko Voutilainen, CEO of Aico Group
“Aico has created strong momentum in the financial automation market and has garnered impressive client wins in the competitive Office of the CFO market.”
“Its differentiated technology solutions are mission critical to accounting and finance teams in the record-to-report segment. We appreciate the confidence that Aico and Juuri Partners have placed in us as partners, and we look forward to bringing Accel-KKR’s deep software and growth experience to help Aico take its growth to the next level.”
– Maurice Hernandez, Managing Director at Accel-KKR
“Aico’s financial close automation platform is extremely competitive in the global market. Customer feedback has been consistently positive since its founding. Over the last few years, we have spent a significant amount of time identifying the perfect partner to achieve Aico’s full potential. We are very excited to have Accel-KKR as our partner going forward. Since the very first meetings with AKKR, we had a strong alignment and conviction on how to accelerate value creation to customers and other stakeholders.”
– Juuri Partners’ Partner Tapani Varjas; Juuri Partners and the management team continue as significant minority owners alongside Accel-KKR
