The finance systems & AI brief for controllers and CFOs

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Fonoa buys PwC's Edge tax platform and raises $110M (3 minute read)
Fonoa, a tax automation company, acquired PwC's Edge indirect tax platform and raised a $110M Series C, expanding its reach across global VAT (value-added tax) and e-invoicing compliance. The acquisition folds a Big Four tax tool into an independent vendor, with the deal expected to close later in 2026. What this means for your stack: if you run indirect tax through PwC Edge or are shopping for e-invoicing compliance, watch how Fonoa integrates the platform before signing a multi-year renewal.

Tessera Labs raises $60M to wire AI into big-company ERP systems (2 minute read)
Global startup funding hit record numbers in Q1, with AI accounting for roughly 80 percent of total global venture investment, according to Crunchbase data. The dominant investment thesis centered around companies owning the operational infrastructure, workflow control layers, and data pipelines that make AI safe to deploy inside regulated enterprise environments.

A couple of examples:

Tessera Labs raised $60M, led by Andreessen Horowitz, to build AI integrations that sit on top of large ERP (core accounting) systems like SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft Dynamics. The pitch is to add AI to existing systems rather than replace them.

Pivot, an AI procurement platform, closed a $40M Series B to expand its agents for purchasing and to deepen connections into ERP (core accounting) systems.

SAP pushes more AI agents into finance teams' daily work (3 minute read)
SAP is expanding the AI agents it embeds in finance workflows, continuing its autonomous finance rollout across close, reconciliation, and reporting tasks inside its core systems. What this means for your stack: SAP customers should map which manual close and reconciliation steps these agents could absorb, since results depend heavily on clean master data and consistent account coding.

Airwallex reaches $12B valuation as global payments platform scales toward IPO readiness (2 minute read)
This is up 50% in under a year, with ARR growing from $1B to $1.5B and a $2B target by year-end. The bigger story for finance leaders is the expansion beyond cross-border payments into spend management, billing, and accounting, signaling a push toward a full financial operating layer that puts Airwallex in direct competition with Stripe and traditional finance software. IPO speculation is growing, though the CEO isn't committing.

Anthropic raises $65B as Claude digs deeper into finance work (4 minute read)
Anthropic raised $65B at a valuation near $1 trillion, passing rival OpenAI, as its Claude assistant keeps expanding into accounting, tax, audit, and reporting tasks inside large companies. Anthropic says it now uses Claude to help produce statutory financial statements and has built more than 70 finance-specific Claude tools. This is meaningful considering they just filed to go public and are presumably using these tools to prepare financials that have to stand up to public company audits.

CFOs expect smaller teams and fewer junior roles as AI grows (3 minute read)
A new survey finds CFOs expect their finance teams to shrink and to hire fewer junior staff as AI takes on routine work, shifting the mix toward more experienced roles.

Gartner's four tips for staffing finance AI projects (3 minute read)
Gartner advises that finance teams getting real results from AI tend to assign specific people to own and scale each initiative, and that success depends more on how the work is structured than on how much is spent. What this means for your stack: name an owner for each AI project on your team rather than treating it as a shared side task, since that is the pattern Gartner links to teams that actually get value.

Goldman Sachs puts AI agents on accounting and compliance tasks (3 minute read)
Goldman Sachs is letting AI agents handle some accounting and compliance work, one of the more prominent examples of a major bank moving these agents from pilots into real finance operations.

Round raises $6M (2 min read): early-stage startup building AI agents to run finance operations.

Mercury raises $200M Series D (2 min read): startup-banking platform valued at $5.2B in a round led by TCV.

Fintech funding weekly roundup (2 min read): just over $450M raised across deals last week.

Worth a second look:

Intuit cuts 17% of its workforce and signs AI deals with Anthropic and OpenAI: the clearest sign yet of how AI is reshaping headcount at a core finance-software vendor.

SAP unveils its Autonomous Enterprise at Sapphire with 200+ AI agents: the context behind this week's continued SAP autonomous finance push.

The CFOs steering Big Tech's trillion-dollar AI spending (9 minute read, paywall)
Fortune profiles how finance chiefs at the largest technology companies are managing enormous AI investments, balancing capital spending against investor pressure on returns.

A CFO's field guide to what AI jargon means for your team (11 minute read)
This operator essay explains AI infrastructure terms like tokens, compute, and context windows in plain language, then connects them to how finance leaders should think about workforce and cost planning.