The San Francisco–based company closed a Series B round led by Blackbird, with Costanoa Ventures, Uncork Capital, Fika Ventures, GD1 and Icehouse Ventures also taking part. 

The money comes a year after the company’s revenue increased, expanded its customer base and pushed more into large global firms.

Contract review has become a bottleneck for many organisations, with volumes growing, deadlines getting tighter, valuable information sitting buried in agreements, usually unread or unusable. 

Ivo is taking a chance that businesses are ready to treat contracts not as paperwork, but as a source of operational insight.

Since its previous raise, the company says annual recurring revenue has increased fivefold. Customer numbers are up by 134%, while usage among Fortune 500 companies has jumped by 250%. Those figures help explain why existing investors doubled down.

“Our goal has always been to make interacting with contracts fast, accurate, and enjoyable,” said Min-Kyu Jung, chief executive and co-founder of Ivo.

“Every key relationship in a business is defined by an agreement, yet most organizations struggle to extract the insights inside them. Our focus is to give in-house teams a trustworthy solution that helps them work faster and gives them visibility into their contracts that was previously impossible.”

The new capital will be used to strengthen the product and scale operations as Ivo expands its footprint among large enterprises. Companies such as Uber, Shopify, Atlassian, Reddit and Canva already use the platform, and adoption is spreading across legal, procurement and commercial teams.

At Uber, ease of use and reliability were central to the decision. “Uber selected Ivo because it was intuitive to use, demonstrated a high level of accuracy, could work in multiple languages, and met its confidentiality requirements,” said Kate Gardner, senior manager, Contract Operations at Uber. “Furthermore, the Ivo team was highly responsive to Uber’s needs.”

At the core of Ivo’s services is a review system designed for in-house lawyers managing high volumes of agreements across regions. In standardising legal positions through lawyer-built playbooks, teams can review contracts faster and with greater consistency. 

Customers report cutting review time by as much as three quarters compared with manual processes.

Beyond review, the platform allows companies to search and understand their entire contract library in seconds. Links between agreements are surfaced automatically, standard positions are flagged, and questions that once took months of checking can now be answered in minutes. 

This shift from reactive review to active oversight is what many legal teams have been missing.

Investors see that focus as the company’s edge. “In-house legal teams demand products that are deeply accurate and aligned to how they work. The most sophisticated teams are incredibly selective about the tools they trust,” said James Palmer, principal at Blackbird. 

“Ivo’s traction with some of the world’s best companies shows it consistently exceeds that bar. With exceptional product execution and an uncompromising quality bar, we believe Ivo is defining and leading the category.”

Ivo’s longer-term plan is to turn contracts into strategic assets rather than static documents. As it grows, the company wants to make contract work clearer, quicker and easier to manage across the business, not just inside the legal department.

The fresh round, which was led by Portage, boosts the company’s total equity funding to $105 million and comes after a quick climb in Flex’s numbers over the past year. 

Revenue has surged, and annual payments flowing through the platform have jumped to $3 billion. The company says more owners of middle-market firms are turning to its system to manage both company and personal finances in one place.

Flex’s latest funding closely follows a $200 million debt raise and an earlier $25 million equity injection. It also arrives on the same day the firm launches Flex Elite, an invite-only consumer card positioned as a direct challenger to Amex’s exclusive Centurion card. 

The card sits at the centre of Flex’s aim to act as a “private bank” for business owners with sizeable personal and commercial interests.

The company is targeting owners whose firms generate between $3 million and $100 million in annual revenue, an often-ignored segment that employs roughly two out of every five American workers. 

Many in this group juggle several financial systems at once, a gap Flex says it is now filling with a suite that covers business credit, payments, expense control, personal spending, and back-office tools.

Flex has been developing a range of automated finance agents to support these products. They handle tasks such as underwriting, payments, expense checks and cash management. 

All of these tools feed into what the company calls a central “motherboard” for owners, aimed at giving them a cleaner view of how their businesses and personal finances move each day.

Credit is a major pillar of the company’s strategy. Its underwriting system is designed to assess risk in real time and help Flex serve customers who struggle to get flexible credit from mainstream banks and large fintech firms. 

With more owners taking up Flex’s business credit card, which offers a 60-day interest-free period on spending, they usually adopt other parts of the platform, helping the company scale with fewer staff and lower operating costs.

Outlining the company’s goal, Founder and CEO Zaid Rahman said: “Our mission is to build the private bank ambitious business owners have always deserved.” He added: “Middle-market business owners employ 40% of Americans, but the financial system has never been designed around their complex needs. Flex is the first platform that supports every step of their financial lives, from the moment they earn revenue to the moment they spend it personally. Unlike many of our FinTech peers who focus on saving large enterprises money, we focus on helping ambitious owners make more money.”

Portage partner Jake Bodanis said the firm is backing Flex because it sees a gap in the market and strong growth potential. “Flex is building a category-defining financial institution,” he said. “The company has proven that middle-market business owners are both massively underserved and extremely valuable customers when given the right financial infrastructure. Flex’s hypergrowth and best-in-class capital efficiency speak to how powerful this model is.”

Flex says it hopes to become the central financial hub for this class of business owners, supporting everything from daily operations to long-term wealth transfers.

The funding round was co-led by TPG’s Rise Fund, its first investment in the Middle East and Saudi Arabia, and Sanabil Investments, a subsidiary of the Public Investment Fund (PIF). 

Other participants include QED, Raed Ventures, Impact 46, MEVP, Isometry Capital, Arzan VC, BNVT Capital, Kaltaire Investments, Endeavor Catalyst, Nour Nouf Ventures, Khwarizmi Ventures, and Wamda Capital.

HALA, which provides embedded financial services to micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs), said the fresh capital will help it strengthen its Saudi market presence, introduce lending products, and expand regionally. 

The company already serves more than 142,000 businesses and processes over $8 billion in transactions annually.

The SME sector represents a key growth area for Saudi Arabia. With as many as 1.8 million SMEs contributing 20–35% of GDP, equivalent to $310–375 billion USD annually, the demand for digital financial solutions is only expected to rise. 

SMEs also employ about 4.7 million people and have grown their GDP contribution by 45% between 2016 and 2021, supported by government initiatives and the wider digital transformation push under Vision 2030.

HALA’s Co-founder and Chairman, Esam Alnahdi, described the investment as a milestone. “This landmark investment is a turning point for HALA, reflecting on our relentless pursuit of innovation and excellence in serving small businesses. 

“We are honored that our new investors recognise the potential of our vision and the impact we aspire to make in the MSME landscape. Our journey is just beginning, and this support fuels our drive to create meaningful change.”

Group CEO and Co-founder, Maher Loubieh, stressed the role of both long-standing and new investors: “We are honored by the continued trust and support of our existing investors – distinguished local and regional business leaders and funds – whose contributions have been instrumental to HALA’s journey so far. At the same time, we are proud to welcome all our new partners, including TPG’s Rise Fund and Sanabil, who, by joining our journey, gave a strong testimonial of the business that the team has built. 

“As we look at the next phase of our growth, we believe that our diverse group of prominent investors bring valuable global expertise and perspective which will elevate our ambitions to execute with even greater scale and impact.”

The Rise Fund said the deal highlights the strength of the market and HALA’s model. Yemi Lalude, partner at TPG and head of Europe, Middle East and Africa for The Rise Funds, commented: “HALA is uniquely positioned to empower micro and small businesses, a key pillar in the region’s economy, by delivering business owners and their customers a broad and growing set of payment solutions. We are excited to support the HALA team in building a clear leader in this underserved segment. 

“Our investment underscores our belief in the growth potential of this market, the rising demand for robust digital banking solutions, and the critical role entrepreneurs play in shaping the next generation economy, not just though innovation but by creating jobs, expanding access, and delivering meaningful social impact.”

Sanabil Investments also underlined its confidence in the company, stating: “We are excited to lead this landmark Series B funding round for HALA. This investment underscores our belief in HALA’s potential to reshape the future of financial services for SMEs and aligns with Sanabil’s mission to support visionary companies with patient capital and strategic guidance. We look forward to partnering with HALA and the other investors in supporting their continued success and expansion.”

With this financing secured, HALA is ready to scale its impact across and beyond the Middle East.

Co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and ICONIQ, with participation from Sequoia, Oak HC/FT and earlier investors, this round comes just 10 weeks after Rillet announced a $25m Series A round from Sequoia, now bringing the company’s total funding raised under a year to over $100 million as it races to replace outdated systems like NetSuite and Intacct.

In conjunction with the new funding, Andreessen Horowitz General Partner, Alex Rampell and ICONIQ General Partner, Seth Pierrepont are joining the board.

Since launch, Rillet has signed over 200 customers and doubled its ARR over the past 12 weeks. The rapid growth has also resulted in strategic partnerships with many of the nation’s top accounting firms like Armanino (top 20) and Wiss (top 50).

The investment accelerates the company’s mission to rebuild enterprise accounting from the ground up, giving finance leaders the ability to scale multi-billion dollar companies with teams a fraction of the size.

“As US CEO of N26, I experienced firsthand how frustrating it was to wait weeks for critical business metrics,” said Nicolas Kopp, CEO and co-founder of Rillet. “My finance team was world-class, but simple requests took weeks because the systems were stuck in the past. I knew there had to be a better way.” 

That conviction led Kopp to partner with Stelios Modes, the technical architect behind N26’s payment infrastructure, to completely rethink what enterprise accounting could become.

The transformation they envisioned is now a reality. PostScript, a unicorn with over $100 million in ARR and global operations, closes its books in just three days using Rillet. Windsurf, one of the fastest-growing companies in recent memory, runs its entire finance operation with a lean team of two people.

Customers consistently report cutting their close times to just a few days while implementing Rillet as fast as 4 weeks vs the 12 months required in traditional systems.

Rillet’s breakthrough lies in how it redefines financial systems architecture. Legacy ERPs are, at their core, “limited databases”. They store transactions, but the real work happens in spreadsheets and bolt-on analytics tools.

Rillet flips that model. It starts with native integrations, which enable structured data to flow into their smart general ledger.

AI is then applied directly within the system, empowering finance teams to collaborate in real time, automate workflows natively and get insightful reporting the moment something happens, not days or weeks later.

Although accounting is the single biggest category in enterprise software –  a $500B+ global market that nearly every company on Earth depends on –  the space is dominated by incumbents owned by slow-moving conglomerates: NetSuite by Oracle, Intacct by Sage, Dynamics by Microsoft. Even more recent players like Acumatica are being folded into private equity portfolios. 

Rillet is a clean-slate rethink for this new era – built for speed, intelligence, and scale. And unlike those legacy platforms, Rillet is built by accountants.

Its Chief Product Officer is a former EY controller; the Head of Customer Success came from PwC; and the VP of Implementations is a CPA and former customer. This DNA shows up in every workflow, every implementation, and every customer result.

“Finance teams deserve the same AI advantages that have revolutionised sales, engineering, and legal,” said Alex Rampell, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. 

While Seema Amble, Partner at Andreessen Horowitz added: “Rillet is delivering that transformation by rebuilding ERP infrastructure specifically for the AI era. We’re excited to support their vision as they scale to serve the next generation of high-growth companies.” 

“In our view, Rillet is not just modernising accounting software, it’s redefining what finance teams can achieve when freed from outdated systems,” said Seth Pierrepont, general partner at ICONIQ. 

“Their AI-native approach can give companies a clear edge: faster insights, leaner teams, and smarter decisions. We believe Rillet will become foundational infrastructure for the next generation of category-defining businesses.”

The timing here is critical. The accounting industry is facing a major talent crunch, with 75% of accountants expected to retire in the next 15 years. At the same time, 80% of routine financial operations could be automated according to Accenture. 

Rillet sits right at this crossroads, creating a new platform shift in how humans and AI work together in finance. The result is transformative: finance teams get more done with fewer people, while shifting their focus from manual grunt work to strategic analysis that actually moves the needle for their business.

Looking ahead, Rillet’s plan is to expand its AI capabilities and deepen integrations across the financial technology stack. The team’s ultimate vision extends far beyond automation; they’re building towards a collaborative platform where AI agents and human expertise work together to transform how businesses understand and manage their financial performance. 

“Our customers are building the companies that will define the next decade of business,” Kopp concluded. “We’re building the infrastructure that will take them there and redefine what’s possible when finance teams have truly modern tools.”

With several customers expected to go public on Rillet’s platform in the next 6-12 months, the company is set to prove that today’s most ambitious businesses can scale from startup to IPO on truly AI-native financial infrastructure – signaling the first major shift in years in how companies run, and win, with finance.

The funding has been raised with participation from Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company. Investors including Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and Kingdom Holding also contributed to the raise for xAI.

The AI platform, which was launched in July 2023, has quickly made progress in the AI sector. Following its establishment, the company introduced the Grok-1 model on the social media platform X in November. 

Recently, xAI announced further advancements with the Grok-1.5 model, which came with long context capabilities, and the Grok-1.5V model, which includes image understanding features. 

The open-source release of Grok-1 has facilitated numerous applications, optimizations, and extensions of the model, contributing to its rapid enhancement.

The new funds will be used to launch its first commercial AI products, develop advanced infrastructure, and expedite research and development for future technologies. 

xAI is creating advanced AI systems that are truthful, competent, and beneficial for all humanity. The company’s mission is to understand the true nature of the universe.

Elon Musk is driving xAI to compete with other major players like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. Musk, who also leads Tesla and co-founded OpenAI, has recently distanced himself from OpenAI, due to issues over its direction and partnerships.

Since its formation, xAI has launched the Grok-1.0 model, a rival to ChatGPT, and made it available to Premium+ users on X for a subscription fee of $16 per month. In April, the company released the Grok-1.5 model and introduced multimodal capabilities. Despite its advancements, Grok’s news summary feature on X has faced criticism for generating misleading information.

On future possibilities, xAI plans to utilize the latest financing round to bring its first set of products to market even as it builds sophisticated infrastructure and enhances innovations. The company is also likely to explore partnerships to extend Grok’s reach beyond X.

Additionally, xAI is actively seeking to expand its team and is hiring for various roles. The company encourages individuals interested in contributing to the future of AI to apply through its careers page.

This funding will help xAI achieve its mission and continue its growth and innovation drive in the AI industry.