Sumary has raised a $25m seed led by Singular, less than a year after Tenity backed its pre-seed.
By Oliver Sjöstedt, Investment Director, Tenity
In vertical AI, whoever earns trust first gets the distribution. Harvey and Legora showed what happens when one team becomes the default AI partner for a whole profession. Now VCs everywhere are hunting for who does that next in your vertical of choice. At pre-seed you have to call who will crack distribution before there’s any proof. So instead of asking about traction, we ask who customers will trust first.
The window is open right now. Every firm is asking the same thing: we have to do something with AI, so who do we partner with? That decision is being made everywhere at once. Harvey and Legora caught that moment in legal tech. In accounting the prize is large where European accounting firms earn an estimated €133bn in fees a year, and most of that work is still manual.
Pascar sees the same rush from the firms’ side.
“Dozens, and probably soon hundreds, of AI accounting firms are being built as we speak. We want to offer existing accounting firms the chance to deliver customer value that is as good as, if not better than, these new entrants, by adopting AI quickly across their operations. With the right technology, they can lead this transformation rather than be disrupted by it.” – Pascar Sivam, co-founder and CEO, Sumary
One test we use as investors is to put ourselves in the buyer’s seat. If I were a managing partner at a top-20 accounting firm, choosing my first AI partner would be a huge bet. Would I trust these founders with it? Are they building for me? Do they have AI talent nobody else has? Are they the furthest ahead?
With Sumary, the signs were there early. One small example among many: at inception Pascar wanted an advisory board made up of the leaders of Denmark’s top accounting firms. Most founders would have turned that into months of warm intros and polite coffees before making the ask. Pascar cold-called them and had his board within days. The board came together fast because they trusted him, and the contracts followed for the same reason.
“My view was simple: whoever the accounting firms trust first will win this market. There was no traction yet when we met Pascar and the team, but I was convinced it would be them. A year later, that’s already playing out.” – Oliver Sjöstedt, Investment Director, Tenity
We backed Sumary at pre-seed, less than a year ago. Today they announced a $25m seed led by Singular, the largest accounting software seed round in Europe, and we’re investing again alongside byFounders and Partech. In that time, they’ve earned the trust of most of the Nordics’ 20 largest accounting firms, leading UK firms, including Deloitte, Grant Thornton and Baker Tilly. Enterprise sales is supposed to take years, and to favour the legacy players who built the last generation of software and still own the market. Sumary has done it in months.
There’s no secret playbook here, and they didn’t skip any of the slow work of building trust. They’re just better and faster at it than anyone we’ve seen. Looking back, three things stood out.
1. They know what the accounting firm is buying, and what it’s worried about. A firm’s name goes on every return it files. So Sumary built that accountability into the product. Every model is tested against their own benchmark of real accounting work before it touches a client’s books, and an accountant reviews and signs off everything it produces. It all runs on the ledgers and workflows the firm already has. By the first meeting, most of the reasons to hesitate have been dealt with.
2. The talent shows up in the product. ML researchers in Copenhagen, plus an application team shipping what accountants actually use day to day. After three months, firms spend 50% less time on the monthly close and 75% less on VAT returns.
3. The safe choice has changed. Nobody got fired for hiring McKinsey, and for decades the same was true of buying from the biggest software vendor. Picking an AI partner is different. When the ground moves this fast, the legacy player built for the last wave of technology is the risky bet. The safe choice is the team you trust to move fastest with you.
What’s next
London becomes Sumary’s commercial hub, with co-founders Pascar Sivam and Frederik Skov Wacher moving from Copenhagen to lead UK growth. Benelux is the next market. Copenhagen stays home to the technology and AI research. Singular’s Jeremy Uzan described the round in the same terms we would: Sumary is “already winning the trust of some of the industry’s largest players.”
We’ll keep looking for founders like these, with raw execution power and a rare ability to earn the trust of the people they serve.
Proud to back Pascar and the team again.
