Aico Receives Majority Equity Investment from Global Software Investor Accel-KKR
New investment propels Aico into a new phase of market expansion in Europe, bringing automation, transparency, and control to the financial close process for large enterprises.
Helsinki, FINLAND, London, UK & Menlo Park, CA – [3] April 2024 – Accel-KKR, a global technology-focused investment firm, today announced a majority equity investment in Aico Group (also “Aico”), an end-to-end financial close software platform for large enterprises. With this investment, Accel-KKR will join current investor Juuri Partners as backers of Aico.
With this investment, Aico will seek to bolster its market expansion across Europe, especially in the DACH region, and continue to develop and strengthen its financial close platform. The company currently serves leading European enterprise customers, such as AkzoNobel, International Airlines Group (IAG), Syngenta, Outokumpu, SKF, and other companies in the Fortune 500.
According to FSN, only 11% of companies have completely transformed their financial reporting process. Yet, despite having extremely complex and unique processes and handling hundreds of thousands of financial-related documents per year on average, many finance departments have a low level of automation and inefficient disconnected spreadsheets holding systems together. This leads to hectic and error-prone work to close the accounts at month's end.
Aico’s end-to-end SaaS platform addresses highly complex, multi-national, and multi-ERP back-office configurations with tight integration to these systems. Aico stands out against other players in the market due to its configurability, which makes Aico’s platform highly adaptive to its enterprise clients’ complex environments and needs, its user-friendly single platform approach, and a unique ability to push and pull data in real-time to other systems, including ERPs. This means that businesses gain quicker and more accurate financial close, and accounting teams gain more transparency and control over their workflow and have time to focus on more strategic and high-value work.
“We have come a long way with Juuri, from a business focused mainly on the local Finnish market to a truly multi-national enterprise SaaS company. I have valued the systematic, hands-on, open, and constructive cooperation with the Juuri team. I am truly excited to have the deep software experience that Accel-KKR will bring to support our management team. We are very pleased to have two experienced growth investors advancing our journey to become a major player in the financial close automation market,” said Marko Voutilainen, CEO of Aico Group.
“Aico has created strong momentum in the financial automation market andhas garnered impressive client wins in the competitive Office of the CFO market,” said Maurice Hernandez, Managing Director at Accel-KKR.
“Its differentiated technology solutions are mission critical to accounting and finance teams in the record-to-report segment. We appreciate the confidence that Aico and Juuri Partners have placed in us as partners, and we look forward to bringing Accel-KKR’s deep software and growth experience to help Aico take its growth to the next level,” he continues.
Juuri Partners originally invested in Aico in 2016. Over the last few years, it has worked with Aico to expand across Europe, including the UK and Germany, to support growth in these markets. Since Juuri Partners’ investment, Aico has built a strong international footprint and expanded its ARR base almost tenfold.
“Aico’s financial close automation platform is extremely competitive in the global market. Customer feedback has been consistently positive since its founding. Over the last few years, we have spent a significant amount of time identifying the perfect partner to achieve Aico’s full potential. We are very excited to have Accel-KKR as our partner going forward. Since the very first meetings with AKKR, we had a strong alignment and conviction on how to accelerate value creation to customers and other stakeholders,” remarked Juuri Partners’ Partner Tapani Varjas. Juuri Partners and the management team continue as significant minority owners alongside Accel-KKR.
In 2023, data from Aico’s platform showed that a typical large customer’s accounting team uses Aico to process half a million documents yearly, saving over 6,000 hours of work time. In addition, Aico prevents thousands of errors in financial journals. Aico also found that accounting teams need to produce 2-3x more documents in November and December than during the rest of the year, highlighting the need for automated closing task managers, account reconciliations, intercompany invoicing, and journal entries.
About Aico Group:
Aico is an advanced financial close platform for large enterprises. Aico helps companies take control of their hectic closing processes, empowering financial teams and freeing time for other important activities. Its customers, including leading European enterprises, achieve a high level of automation and standardization of processes, faster month-end financial reporting, and assurance of compliance and data accuracy. Established in 2019 in Espoo, Finland, Aico has offices in Finland, Germany, the UK and Latvia. For more information, visit www.aico.ai.
About Juuri Partners
Juuri Partners manages two private equity funds with approximately €200 million in cumulative capital commitments. Juuri Partners supports entrepreneurs in building success stories and invests in exceptional small and medium-sized companies in Finland. Juuri Partners offers a business development concept that combines growth financing, active ownership and strategic business support. The investor base for the funds comprises of Finnish and international institutional investors. Visit www.juuripartners.fi to learn more.
About Accel-KKR:
Accel-KKR is a technology-focused investment firm with $19 billion in cumulative capital commitments. The firm focuses on software and tech-enabled businesses well-positioned for top-line and bottom-line growth. At the core of Accel-KKR’s investment strategy is a commitment to developing strong partnerships with the management teams of its portfolio companies and a focus on building value alongside management by leveraging the significant resources available through the Accel-KKR network. Accel-KKR focuses on middle-market companies and provides a broad range of capital solutions, including buyout capital, minority-growth investments, and credit alternatives. Accel-KKR also invests across various transaction types, including private company recapitalizations, divisional carve-outs and going-private transactions. Accel-KKR’s headquarters is in Menlo Park, with offices in Atlanta, London, and Mexico City. Visit accel-kkr.com to learn more.
Media Contacts:
For Juuri Partners: Tapani Varjas, Partner, Juuri Partners, +358 40 555 5758, tapani.varjas@juuripartners.fi
For Accel-KKR: Todd Fogarty, Kekst CNC, Partner, +1 917 992 1170, todd.fogarty@kekstcnc.com
For Aico: Marko Voutilainen, CEO, Aico Group, +358 40 843 3290, marko.voutilainen@aico.ai