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👋 Hi, it’s Rohit Malhotra and welcome to the FREE edition of Partner Growth Newsletter, my weekly newsletter doing deep dives into the fastest-growing startups and S1 briefs. Subscribe to join readers who get Partner Growth delivered to their inbox every Wednesday morning.

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Subscribe to the Life Self Mastery podcast, which guides you on getting funding and allowing your business to grow rocketship. 

Previous guests include Guy Kawasaki, Brad Feld, James Clear, Nick Huber, Shu Nyatta and 350+ incredible guests.

The Round is a new feature format I’m experimenting with that will take a deeper look at interesting funding rounds across SaaS, AI, and emerging technology. The idea is to go beyond the headline number and look at what’s really happening underneath the round. Growth, valuation, investors, strategic rationale, and ultimately what the financing might tell us about a company’s M&A or IPO prospects. The cadence of this style of article is unknown as of yet, but there are a lot of fascinating rounds happening right now that I want to dig into and share about.

48 hours. That is how long it took Rillet to go from a board meeting to a unicorn, on a round it says it wasn't trying to raise. The easy read is froth: another name built for AI, another billion in valuation. That is not what happened here.

Rillet raised $100M Series C at a $1B valuation, two years out of stealth and $200M deep with Iconiq, Andreessen Horowitz, and Sequoia. Annualized revenue doubled in a single quarter. 600 customers, most of them ripping out NetSuite, Oracle, and Intuit, not piloting alongside them.

That last number is the tell. This is not a bet on better bookkeeping software. It is a bet on who owns the general ledger when an accountant shortage collides with AI agents that can run the close.

So the 48 hours is not the story. The repricing underneath it is. The same investors who led the Series A and B decided the accounting install base is up for grabs faster than the incumbents can defend it.

$100M Series C at a $1B valuation. The stack underneath it matters more: $200M raised in roughly two years, across a Sequoia-led Series A, a $70M Iconiq co-led Series B last summer, and now this. Three rounds, one valuation curve bending up fast.

Growth is the engine. Annualized revenue doubled in a single quarter. Not a year. A quarter. 600 customers on the platform, from a standing start at exit from stealth two years ago.

The customer mix is where the argument lives. 50% come from Intuit, 30% from NetSuite and Sage Intacct, 20% from Oracle, SAP, Workday, and Microsoft. Every one of those is a switch, not a greenfield install. This is not net new demand. It is share taken from incumbents who priced this category as locked.

The valuation is the part to sit with. $1B on a company two years out of stealth, closed in 48 hours, on a round the company says it was not running. Investors are not paying for current revenue. They are paying for the slope.

Iconiq led, having co-led the Series B. Sequoia re-upped, having led the Series A. This round is insiders doubling down, not outsiders discovering.

Pierrepont at Iconiq framed it plainly: this was not a cold start. A year of watching the team beat incumbents that have owned accounting for decades made leading the Series C the obvious move. Bek at Sequoia called re-investing an easy decision, because they already had the context. Nobody was underwriting a pitch. They were underwriting a scoreboard they had already been reading for twelve months.

So the 48 hours is not recklessness. It is the reward for being on the cap table when the slope showed up.

The forward bet is bigger than accounting. Bek's read: the wedge is bookkeeping, but the prize is the entire finance function, and agentic finance could be one of the largest application software openings of the AI era.

That is what a $1B check on unproven scale actually buys. Not the ledger Rillet holds today. The finance stack they think it becomes.

One. Timing that fixes itself. The accountant shortage is structural, not cyclical. Graduates with accounting degrees have been declining since 2010, and 61% of finance leaders say they could not find talent this past year. The demand for the work is not falling. The people to do it are. That gap does not need Rillet to widen it. It widens on its own, every year, and hands the wedge over for free.

Two. The switch cost myth, called. ERP was supposed to be sticky forever. Rillet's customer mix says otherwise: 50% pulled from Intuit, 30% from NetSuite and Sage Intacct, 20% from the Oracle and SAP tier. The install base incumbents treated as locked is turning out to be rentable. The bet is that the lock was never real, only unchallenged, and it holds only until something genuinely better shows up to test it.

Three. The bet that justifies the $1B. Accounting is the entry point, not the destination. Whoever runs the general ledger with agents ends up running the close, then FP&A, then the finance function itself. Land the ledger, own the stack.

One. The incumbents it is bleeding have the motive and the worst hand to play it. 50% of Rillet's customers came from Intuit, 30% from NetSuite and Sage Intacct. For Oracle or Intuit, this is not an acquisition. It is buying back the customers already walking out. The catch is price. You do not get a friendly number on the company built to unseat you, and every quarter of doubled revenue makes the check worse.

Two. EY is already inside, through the alliance to bring AI tooling into the audit practice. That is the tell the Big 4 read agentic accounting as existential. But advisory firms buy capabilities, not application software at a $1B sticker. The likelier path is partnership hardening into distribution, then a strategic stake. EY does not need to own Rillet. It needs Rillet to not belong to a rival's audit arm.

Three. The real acquirer is the platform betting finance is the next control plane. Microsoft, Salesforce, ServiceNow. Each sits next to the CFO and none owns the ledger. For them Rillet is not a bolt-on. It is the governance layer for every agent that touches money. That is who pays the number.

One. That the growth is real revenue, not booked optimism. Annualized revenue doubling in a quarter is the whole thesis, so the filing has to separate signed ARR from live, recognized revenue, and show net revenue retention. If existing customers expand as agents move from bookkeeping into the close, the land-and-own story holds. If the number is mostly new logos, it is a customer acquisition story wearing a platform costume.

Two. That the switches stick. 600 customers pulled from Intuit, NetSuite, and Oracle means nothing if they churn back in year two. The S-1 needs gross retention by cohort and by source system. A ripped-out ERP that gets re-ripped is a demo, not a moat.

Three. The unit economics under the AI. Model routing to OpenAI or Anthropic is a cost line that scales with usage. Gross margin has to show the agents get cheaper to run as they get better, or the software multiple does not survive contact with a compute bill.

Four. Concentration and governance. How much revenue rides on the largest accounts, and whether the audit-trail feature clears regulators who still require a human to approve every agent transaction.

The 48 hours will get the headlines. It is the least interesting thing here.

What matters is that Rillet did not raise on a story. It raised on a scoreboard the insiders had watched for a year, and the score was share taken from Intuit, NetSuite, and Oracle, one switch at a time. That is the part incumbents cannot spin. When 80% of your new customers arrive by leaving someone else, you are not growing a market. You are repricing one.

The lesson underneath is older than AI. Sticky is a story incumbents tell themselves until something better makes the switch worth the pain. ERP held for two decades not because the lock was real, but because nobody credible tested it. Rillet tested it. The lock gave.

So the $1B is not a bet on accounting software. It is a bet on who holds the ledger when agents run the finance function, priced before Microsoft or Oracle can respond. The risk is the same as the thesis: a seat this valuable does not stay uncontested, and the incumbents still own the distribution.

Rillet has the slope. The open question is whether it owns the position before the giants decide to buy or build their way back.

Here is my interview with Fadwa Ouardani, a business angel and VC investor at Leblon Capital, backing founders across the US and Europe.

If you enjoyed our analysis, we’d very much appreciate you sharing with a friend.

Here are the options I have for us to work together. If any of them are interesting to you - hit me up!

And that’s it from me. See you next week.

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