Control vs. Automation: Why Light's Bet Is That AI Makes Finance More Accurate, Not Just Faster

**Alex Theuma** (0:03)
Every decade or so, the rules of software change completely. This is one of those moments. The AI Revolution Show is the intelligence podcast for B2B software founders navigating the platform shift. The founders building through it, and the founders already on the other side.
I've known the team at Recap for years now, and I've watched a good number of their customers grow into something serious. So when I talk about them here, it comes from actually seeing how this works. Something I'm noticing more and more is founders thinking carefully about their capital stack before they take on equity. Sometimes equity is the right fit. Sometimes debt makes more sense. When founders go the debt route, they tend to use it to fund growth, bridge to profitability, or hold off on an equity round until they can raise on better terms, all without giving up a single share. And that's what Recap does. They provide non-dilutive funding to growth companies across the UK, Germany, and the Netherlands with tickets from 100K to 3 million. It's built for companies already earning real revenue. Their platform helps you work out how much funding and what kind would fit you best based on your actual financials and goals. So if funding is on your mind, head to recap.com. That's recap.com.
Set up your account and get an instant fundability check. In a few minutes, you'll know where the recap can fund you and how much.
Jonathan, welcome to the show. Thanks for coming in on the hottest day of the year.

**Jonathan Sanders** (1:35)
Thanks for having me. It is a hot day indeed.

**Alex Theuma** (1:38)
It was. I was a little bit nervous as to whether we'd actually be able to record, not about, I guess in part because of the heat. But I live by the coast and it's a two hour train drive sort of into here. And there was all warnings about disruption.

**Jonathan Sanders** (1:53)
Yes.

**Alex Theuma** (1:53)
But actually there was none. And it was fine.

**Jonathan Sanders** (1:55)
I did see that. I was a little bit concerned if I could even get the tube over here. But it did roll on time.

**Alex Theuma** (2:02)
Yes, it did. Well, thanks for coming in. So I guess for those that are watching, that are listening, what is Light in a sentence?

**Jonathan Sanders** (2:10)
Yes. So Light is the finance platform. We're building this intelligence finance platform for companies that want to scale globally. So if you want to scale globally, basically everything in your company works, your AI agents, your sales motions, design, products, operations, etc.
Where it breaks is typically finance. So you'll build your finance stack around maybe a zero or QuickBooks and it doesn't scale globally. And the only alternative so far has been basically ERP products from either SAP or Workday or Oracle. And we built Light to basically remove that need and allow you to scale globally. So we consolidate payments, approvals and financial statements in Light. So our clients use it to pay bills globally. You can have 40 different entities, pay bills across the world, do contract management, subscription management, and issue cards in the platforms. You can cover most of your cash in and cash out needs for a multi-multi-national company and we work with post-Series A all the way to IPO companies.

**Alex Theuma** (3:22)
And prior to Light, you co-founded Juni. Was it something like whilst you were running Juni that you saw that, okay, we need to build this product?

**Jonathan Sanders** (3:31)
I saw the journey twice where we migrated to an Oracle ERP, first at play.io and then at Juni. And both of those companies were, of course, created in smaller countries. And so when you're founding out of Europe, you need something that scales with you very quickly in your journey.
If you're built in a very large country like the US, then you can grow your company more before you have a need to be multinational and multi-entity. But when you're founded in Stockholm or Denmark, then the need to scale your finance systems comes in like year one or year two.
And in both instances, we migrated to an Oracle solution. And I was like, is there nothing else in the market? It's Oracle, Microsoft or SAP. And if you don't know that landscape in details, these are 30, 40 year old products that are clunky to use at best. So it takes a year to implement. You don't get a ton of value out of it. You still need a lot of point solutions to be layered on top of it. And what we thought was like, it would be much simpler and easier for you and much later, and that's where the origin of the name comes from, that you have like one system that could lift most of your payment needs, because most people have the same need for paying bills, paying reimbursements, doing cards, even subscriptions, etc. are quite sort of similar in nature between different businesses. And so we thought, okay, it will be way easier for people if they could have that in one platform that combines both the accounting side and the payment side in one. And that's how we sort of thought about light. So both of those prior companies were mainly on the payment sides, and now we're combining accounting and payment in one. When you then translate that into the AI era, then what you actually have is a platform that has a lot more tools available to the agents that you're building in light. So we have clients that are building everything from automatically categorizing and fine-tuning how all the transactions are, like hitting the GL accounts and all book kept correctly, to others basically doing like compliance checks, checking that all of the customers have valid VAT numbers, checking that all the vendors don't have any peps and sanctions, to finally also even clients doing automated money movement between different transfers so they can basically say, okay, whenever I have more than X amounts in this bank account, I'll move it over to this bank accounts and the system initiates that and kicks it out for approvals and then that's automated. So there's a lot of benefits to that because at the same time, you also need to make sure that that is accounted for correctly. But since it's in the same platform, it does both things at the same time.