While working as the CFO of an Indonesian payment gateway, Rey Kamal helped keep his entrepreneur friends’ books up to date and file their tax reports on time. After a while, he felt the monthly accounting and tax work was becoming repetitive and started thinking of a way to automate the task.

In 2019, Kamal reunited with Adrian Yasin, an old friend, and realized their business plan to “standardize accounting services like McDonald’s burgers.”

The two founders ended up launching Ledgerowl in the same year, and they have bootstrapped the startup ever since. But that changed recently when the Indonesia-based firm raised an undisclosed sum in a pre-seed round co-led by VC firms Init 6 and Investible.

“While we’ve successfully bootstrapped to date, we realized how an injection of capital will add fuel to scale and grab this fast-growing market,” Kamal said in a statement received by Tech in Asia.

Ledgerowl is building back-office support – including financial operations, accounting, and tax administration – for small and medium-sized businesses.

The company uses an AI-powered platform to automate tasks involved in bookkeeping – ranging from data collection, data entry, and reconciliation to the classification of transactions.

Kamal told Tech in Asia that the startup grew 7x amid the pandemic as the need to outsource back-office support went up.

In 2020, Ledgerowl onboarded Umawar Investment Group as its first strategic partner. Ledgerowl is also an official partner of Xero, a New Zealand-based accounting software firm, and has built strategic relationships with other Indonesian fintech startups: Monit and Brankas.

Ledgerowl said it will use the fresh funding to expand its customer base and improve its product roadmap. It said that it is also “aggressively” developing its machine learning capabilities to make it easier to create financial statements.

(Source: TechinAsia)