Singapore-based accounting automation startup SimpleAI has raised $5 million in seed funding and secured a separate $10-million debt facility to pursue acquisition-led growth across Asia Pacific.
A lead investor has committed to the seed round, although the company did not disclose its identity. SimpleAI said it continues to bring in strategic investors as part of the financing.
The latest round follows a $500,000 pre-seed investment.
The debt facility will be used to acquire accounting and fund administration firms. “With these two funding sources, SimpleAI is shifting from organic growth to an acquisition-led approach,” the firm said in a statement.
Founded in 2023 by Roger Tan, Shim Youngjun, and Bryan Sng, SimpleAI is a Singapore-based AI accounting platform that automates finance workflows for accounting teams and fund administrators.
“The endless loop of sending a report, catching an error, amending it, reviewing again, and how familiar the excuses had become for late submissions. When OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022, we saw that the barrier to processing unstructured data had finally dropped. That was the moment we started sketching out how we could put a large language model to work on this kind of data. That sketch became the business,” Bryan Sng, co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of SimpleAI, said.
SimpleAI is primarily targeting to acquire businesses with annual revenue of between $500,000 and $5 million while remaining open to larger transactions involving firms generating more than $20 million a year.
Its near-term focus is Singapore and Australia, with Hong Kong and Mauritius also under consideration. The company said it currently has more than $25 million worth of potential transactions under review across Singapore and Australia.
Under what it calls a partner-and-operator model, acquired firms will continue serving their existing clients independently while receiving technology and operational support from SimpleAI.
The company said it will assess potential targets based on unit economics, cultural fit, and whether AI agents can be integrated into the firm’s workflows.
“As an AI-native company, our M&A facility lets us acquire businesses where we can deploy our agents into the workflow immediately,” SimpleAI founder and CEO Roger Tan said.
SimpleAI also said it is targeting a public-market exit, including a potential initial public offering, within the next 24 months.
