Round, a finance automation platform startup, has raised £4.5 million in a seed round led by Alstin Capital, with participation from Backed VC and Love Ventures. Around 10% of existing customers also invested, alongside angel investors including Paul Forster, founder of Indeed. The funding will be used to accelerate product development, expand the engineering and go-to-market teams, deepen integrations across banks and financial systems, and scale the platform's infrastructure.
Finance teams still operate across disconnected systems, approving invoices in one tool, logging into bank portals to make payments, chasing contractors over email, and reconciling across spreadsheets. Each payment run, payroll cycle and cash movement requires a human to execute steps rather than make decisions. Round combines wallets, payment rails and treasury infrastructure with automation so that finance teams can set rules such as approval thresholds, payment schedules and cash minimums, and have execution handled automatically. Payments are processed, payroll is funded and completed, and transactions are logged with audit trails while syncing back to ERP systems.
Round has launched two new products: an Agentic Workflow Builder and Autonomous Payroll. The workflow builder allows finance teams to describe processes in plain English, after which workflows are created for approval and then run continuously. Autonomous Payroll pulls payslips, routes approvals, funds payments and executes payroll without requiring manual intervention. Since launching its first automated workflows less than a year ago, the platform has processed over $500 million.
Everyone's trying to build an AI CFO. Cursor didn't get big by replacing the CTO. It got big by doing the work engineers didn't want to do. We're taking the same approach, but for finance, We are building for the finance team of the future, one that understands the importance of automation to keep up with the pace of modern companies. AI tools are rapidly being deployed across the industry and finance teams do not need to be left behind.
Round understands that true finance automation requires infrastructure, not just software. The platform is positioned between banks, ERPs, and payment rails and orchestrates cash flows in real time. This is not an optimization of existing processes, but a fundamentally new way for companies to manage their finance operations. This vision and measurable execution convinced us as lead investor.
Round’s workflow builder changes what's possible. A finance team can describe work they do as steps, the system builds a workflow, they approve it, and it runs forever in the background. This funding lets us take that approach to every repetitive process in finance.
