Round secures £4.5m in seed funding

By Aarav Garg

Round, a UK-based AI-powered finance automation platform, has secured £4.5 million in a seed funding round led by Alstin Capital, with participation from BACKED VC and Love Ventures.

Around 10% of Round’s existing customers invested as part of the fund, along with new angel investors like Paul Forster, co-founder of Indeed. Existing investor Passion Capital, which was an early backer of Monzo, Tide and GoCardless, also took part.

Despite heavy investment in software, systems are disconnected and still require much of the day-to-day work to be completed manually, which is an issue Round aims to solve. For this, it shifts finance from software that advises, to systems that execute and automate real tasks like payments, payroll and cash management.

“Everyone’s trying to build an AI CFO – something that tells you what to do,” said Pac O’Shea, co-founder of Round. “We’re focused on doing the work itself. The biggest bottleneck in finance isn’t decision-making, it’s execution. Teams are still manually running payments, moving cash and reconciling systems. We’re building the execution layer that sits across that entire stack and runs it automatically. This backing from some of Europe’s leading investors is a strong validation that this is where finance is heading.”

The funding is said to be used to accelerate product development, expand engineering and go-to-market teams, deepen integrations across banks and financial systems, and scale the platform’s infrastructure.