Sumary lands $25m seed from Singular, moves commercial base to London and targets Benelux next

Sumary, a Copenhagen-born startup that automates the routine work inside accounting firms, has raised a $25m seed round led by Singular. The company says it is the largest seed cheque Europe has seen for accounting software, and it comes less than twelve months after a $4.22m pre-seed.

The size of the jump is the story. Seed rounds of this scale usually follow clear commercial traction, and Sumary is pointing to a customer list that includes Deloitte, Grant Thornton and Baker Tilly, plus most of the 20 largest accounting practices in the Nordics.

Who is backing Sumary, and how the round compares

All three institutional investors from the pre-seed are putting in more money: byFounders, which led that first round, along with Partech and Tenity. Singular is the new lead.

A group of founder angels joins too. They include Steve Anavi of Qonto, Tuomas Artman of Linear, Stanislas Polu of Dust, Steffen Tjerrild of Synthesia, Jannick Malling of Public.com and Ben Freeman of Omnea. Earlier angels included Zendesk co-founder Morten Primdahl and Christian Rasmussen, the founder of Roger.

When Sumary raised its pre-seed in November 2025, it pitched itself as an AI co-pilot for bookkeepers, controllers and finance teams. It handled bookkeeping, reconciliation, error detection and reporting, and its early users were Danish bookkeeping firms and outsourced CFO providers. A year on, the target has narrowed and grown at the same time. Sumary now sells itself as an operating system for accounting firms, aimed squarely at the large practices.

Singular general partner Jeremy Uzan said the founders had paired AI research depth with a working knowledge of how accounting firms run, and that "their commercial momentum is exceptional."

What the software does for a firm

Sumary sits on top of the ledgers that clients already use, such as Business Central, Xero, NetSuite and QuickBooks, so firms do not have to migrate anyone. It prepares the monthly close, VAT returns and year-end work across a firm's whole client book. Each job then lands with an accountant to review and sign off. The accountant stays responsible; the software does the preparation.

The company says firms on the platform have cut the time spent on monthly closes by about half, and the time on VAT returns by 75%, after three months of use. Those figures come from Sumary and have not been independently verified.

The product also flags VAT, coding and pricing errors, consolidates groups with several entities, and lets an accountant ask questions about a client's finances. Answers link back to the transactions behind them. Sumary's argument is that the hours freed up can go to advice, including for smaller clients who rarely get it today.

Accuracy is where an accounting tool lives or dies, and Sumary has built a research unit in Copenhagen, staffed partly by machine-learning PhDs, to work on it. The team scores AI models against an in-house benchmark of real accounting tasks. It also tests the setup around each model: the data it is fed, the limits placed on it and the checks run on its output. A new model has to clear those tests before it touches client books.

Where the $25m goes

London becomes the commercial headquarters. Chief executive Pascar Sivam and chief operating officer Frederik Skov Wacher are both relocating there to run the UK push. Product, engineering and AI research stay in Copenhagen.

The first market on the continent will be Benelux. Sumary plans to grow its sales team and its group of forward-deployed accountants, staff who work alongside a customer firm from the first day, and to keep spending on research.

The pitch is built around a labour problem. The company puts annual fees in European accounting at about €133bn, and says firms have more work than they can staff. Hiring used to be the answer, but there are no longer enough accountants to hire.

"Dozens, and probably soon hundreds, of AI accounting firms are being built as we speak," Sivam said.

That is the competitive bet. New firms are being set up from scratch around AI, and they threaten the established practices. Sumary is choosing to arm the incumbents rather than become one of the new firms itself. Its offer to established practices is a way to match the newcomers on service without rebuilding from zero. "Accounting firms are being asked to do more with fewer people," Sivam said.

A team of five co-founders

Sumary has five co-founders. Sivam and chief bookkeeper Bastian Schneider both worked at McKinsey; Sivam also co-founded Blazar Capital and worked on scaling the Danish watch brand Nordgreen. Lucas Rantzau is chief product and technology officer. Frederik Hvilshøj, the chief scientist, was previously lead machine-learning engineer at Encord.

For European accounting technology, the round shows that investors will pay seed prices usually reserved for later stages when a startup can name some of the largest audit and accounting networks as customers. The next test is whether the Nordic traction carries over to the UK and Benelux, where it is still building its customer base. Sumary says it will show what it has been building next at a product event on Thursday 12 November.