Congrats to the Accend (YC S23) team! We are proud to have backed this stellar ex-Brex team on a mission to leverage AI to accelerate the work of risk and compliance teams. AI is well suited to automate manual, repetitive back-office tasks, enabling teams to focus on complex, high-value workflows — Accend is already freeing up extraordinary amounts of time for their customers, and this is just the beginning 🚀
Today is THE DAY. BIG DAY for us at Accend (YC S23)! I’m VERY excited to announce our seed round 🚀 Last year Yutong Pei and I left Brex, and Joseph left his startup to start Accend. We were thrilled to join the Y Combinator S23 batch—thanks to Aaron Epstein, Nicolas Dessaigne, Dalton Caldwell, and Pete Koomen for believing in us 🙏 . Being part of YC completely changed our lives. But, the startup life is far from predictable. Early into YC, we pivoted from our initial concept. Drawing on our rich experiences from the Risk team at Brex and engaging with hundreds of brilliant Risk & Compliance professionals, we identified a critical inefficiency: the extortionate amount of manual, repetitive work to onboard new businesses in fintech and banking. So, we decided to go all-in on the idea of accelerating business onboarding using AI. Fast forward to today: 🤩 We landed marquee customers in the US and Europe, including Pleo, Slope, Rho and others who trust Accend to speed up their risk & compliance operations. 💰 We’re sharing that we raised $3.2M from amazing investors we’re grateful to have in our corner, including Adverb Ventures, Y Combinator, General Catalyst, 645 Ventures, and angels from Brex, Stripe, Carta and many more. 📣 Our funding announcement was featured in Axios: (linked in comments!) I’m incredibly grateful for the trust our investors and customers have placed in us. But what excites me the most is what lies ahead. We're just getting started and there’s much more to build. Thank you for being part of this journey. Here’s to continuing to innovate in AI x Finance, and push boundaries together 💪🏽 🙌 Jessica Verrilli, April Underwood, Yasmeena Faycurry, Nnamdi Okike, Meredith Tibbals, Tamanna Khemani, Nathaniel Levy-Westhead, Niko Bonatsos, Erica Dorfman, Sam Stone, Ambika Acharya, Flora Z., Prabhav Jain, Jesika H., Max Segall, Juan Abundes, Brandon Ballinger, Will Larson, Kelley Rivoire, Uma Chingunde, Amy Yin, Orange Collective...(continued in the 1st comment - list is too long and LinkedIn won't let me tag more people) Alright… time to get back to building now 💻