Nicolas Kopp – CEO & Founder of Rillet

Nicolas Kopp is the founder and CEO of Rillet, an AI-native enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform designed to modernize accounting and financial operations for high-growth and global companies.

Kopp is a fintech and enterprise-software entrepreneur whose career has taken him from investment banking at Morgan Stanley to an early leadership role at European digital bank N26 and ultimately to founding Rillet. His experience as an operator gave him firsthand exposure to the limitations of legacy financial systems—and became the foundation for Rillet's mission to build a real-time, AI-native alternative.

In 2026, Kopp's company reached a major milestone: Rillet raised $100 million in Series C funding at a $1 billion valuation, bringing its total funding to more than $200 million. The round was led by ICONIQ, with continued participation from Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.

Who Is Nicolas Kopp?

Nicolas Kopp is a technology entrepreneur, fintech executive, and the founder and CEO of Rillet.

Before founding Rillet, Kopp spent approximately five years at Morgan Stanley, working in investment banking and global capital markets. He subsequently joined N26, the German digital bank, as one of its early employees.

At N26, Kopp initially led business development and operations before becoming U.S. CEO. His work included building partnerships, developing the company's premium offering, and helping lead its expansion into international markets.

That combination of finance, banking, operations, and startup experience would later prove particularly valuable when Kopp began rebuilding enterprise accounting software from the ground up.

Education and Early Career

Kopp studied Business Administration at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, where he earned his bachelor's degree.

He subsequently earned a Master's degree in Accounting & Finance from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He also spent time at Columbia University during his undergraduate studies.

His professional career began in financial services.

Before joining N26, Kopp worked at Goldman Sachs, Lazard, and Morgan Stanley, gaining experience across securities, financial advisory, investment banking, and global capital markets.

Rather than remaining on the traditional finance career path, Kopp eventually moved into technology startups.

That decision became the turning point in his career.

Joining N26

In 2015, Kopp joined N26 as one of the company's early employees.

N26 was attempting to reinvent retail banking through a mobile-first experience, and Kopp became responsible for business development and operations.

He helped build the company's business-development function and established important partnerships, including a relationship with TransferWise. He also contributed to the development of N26's premium banking products and international expansion.

Kopp eventually became U.S. CEO of N26, where he was responsible for the company's American operations.

His time at N26 gave him a front-row view of what happens when a technology company attempts to modernize one of the world's most complicated industries.

It also exposed him to another problem that would later become central to Rillet.

Financial data was still too slow.

The Problem That Inspired Rillet

While running N26's U.S. business, Kopp experienced firsthand the difficulties of obtaining timely and reliable financial information.

Modern companies could generate enormous amounts of financial data every day, yet finance teams often had to wait until the end of a reporting cycle to reconcile that information and understand what had actually happened.

Accounting systems were designed around historical workflows.

Data arrived in batches.

Teams reconciled spreadsheets.

Accountants manually investigated discrepancies.

Companies waited for month-end closes.

By the time executives received verified financial information, the underlying business could already have changed.

Kopp saw an opportunity to rebuild this system.

As he later explained, even with an excellent finance team, his previous company could take weeks to close its books and obtain reliable numbers.

That experience became the starting point for Rillet.

Founding Rillet

Kopp founded Rillet in 2021 with the ambition of rebuilding enterprise accounting software for modern businesses.

The company spent approximately three years developing the product before publicly launching in August 2024.

Instead of immediately pursuing publicity and rapid customer acquisition, the team focused on building an accounting platform capable of handling complex financial workflows for high-growth companies.

When Rillet launched publicly, the company had a deliberately ambitious proposition:

Replace legacy ERP architecture with an AI-native financial system.

Rillet initially focused on modern finance teams at software and high-growth companies, where traditional accounting systems frequently required extensive customization, spreadsheets, manual reconciliation, and disconnected tools.

What Is Rillet?

Rillet is an AI-native ERP and accounting platform designed to replace legacy financial systems.

Its platform combines the general ledger with automation and integrations across the broader finance stack.

Rillet is designed to support areas including:

• General ledger
• Accounts payable
• Accounts receivable
• Revenue recognition
• Financial reporting
• Reconciliation
• Multi-entity accounting
• Financial close
• Audit readiness
• AI-powered accounting workflows

The company's fundamental proposition is different from simply adding AI features to an existing ERP.

Rillet is attempting to build the accounting system around AI from the beginning.

The "Zero-Day Close"

One of Kopp's most important ideas is the concept of the zero-day close.

Traditional finance organizations typically perform a month-end close after the accounting period ends. Teams gather data, reconcile accounts, investigate discrepancies, post adjustments, and eventually produce reliable financial statements.

This process can take days or weeks.

Rillet's vision is to make financial information continuously accurate and available in real time.

Instead of asking:

"How quickly can we close the books?"

Kopp wants companies to reach a point where they effectively never need to wait for the books to close.

Rillet's product strategy therefore focuses on continuous accounting, automation, real-time integrations, and AI-driven reconciliation.

Rillet's Rapid Growth

Rillet's growth accelerated dramatically after its public launch.

By August 2025, the company had signed more than 200 customers and had doubled its ARR over a 12-week period.

It raised a $25 million Series A led by Sequoia Capital and then, only about ten weeks later, announced a $70 million Series B co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and ICONIQ.

That brought Rillet's funding above $100 million within roughly a year of its public launch.

The company also expanded partnerships with accounting firms and began positioning itself as an alternative to established ERP platforms.

$100 Million Series C and $1 Billion Valuation

Rillet's biggest milestone came in 2026.

The company raised $100 million in Series C funding at a $1 billion valuation.

ICONIQ led the round, with continued participation from Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.

The financing brought Rillet's total funding to more than $200 million.

The milestone transformed Rillet from a promising accounting startup into an AI-finance unicorn.

It also validated Kopp's decision to tackle one of enterprise software's most difficult categories: accounting and ERP.

Rillet's Customer Growth

By August 2026, Rillet had grown to more than 600 customers, according to Business Insider, spanning industries including healthcare, finance, and biotechnology.

Rillet has positioned itself as a replacement for legacy systems such as Oracle Fusion and NetSuite, particularly for companies that want modern, AI-driven financial operations.

The company has also reported more than 300 customers during earlier stages of its expansion and millions of financial transactions processed each month.

The rapid growth has made Rillet one of the most closely watched startups in the emerging AI accounting category.

AI-Native Accounting

For Kopp, artificial intelligence is not simply an additional feature inside accounting software.

It changes the architecture of the product itself.

Traditional accounting systems primarily record financial events.

Rillet's ambition is to create a system that can understand those events, reason about them, reconcile them, and take action.

The company's 2026 Series C announcement described the vision as building "Accounting Superintelligence"—an AI-native ERP capable of reasoning about financial events as they happen rather than waiting for month-end batch processing.

This approach puts Rillet in a broader movement toward AI agents that perform specialized business functions.

In accounting, that could mean AI systems capable of:

• Identifying reconciliation discrepancies
• Creating journal entries
• Explaining financial anomalies
• Preparing financial reports
• Monitoring controls
• Assisting with audits
• Automating repetitive accounting tasks
• Maintaining continuous financial records

The Future of the Accountant

Kopp does not position Rillet's mission simply as replacing accountants.

Instead, his argument is that accountants should spend less time performing repetitive administrative work and more time applying judgment.

This distinction is central to Rillet's philosophy.

Accounting professionals have deep domain expertise, but much of their time can be consumed by repetitive processes: downloading reports, reconciling spreadsheets, checking transactions, and manually moving data between systems.

AI can potentially absorb much of that work.

The accountant can then focus on interpretation, controls, strategy, and decision-making.

Rillet and EY

Rillet's strategy received an important enterprise validation in April 2026 when the company announced an alliance with EY.

The partnership combines EY's finance transformation, risk, controls, and operating-model expertise with Rillet's AI-native general-ledger platform.

The two companies positioned the alliance around finance transformation that is AI-native, real-time, and audit-ready.

For Kopp, partnerships like this are important because enterprise finance cannot be transformed through technology alone.

Trust, compliance, controls, and implementation are equally important.

Challenging Legacy ERP

One of Kopp's biggest ambitions is to challenge the dominance of legacy ERP systems.

Companies have traditionally depended on platforms from vendors such as:

• Oracle
• SAP
• NetSuite
• Sage
• Microsoft

These systems are deeply embedded in enterprise finance departments, but they were largely designed before today's AI capabilities existed.

Kopp argues that companies should not simply place AI on top of decades-old accounting architecture.

Instead, the underlying financial system should be rebuilt around real-time data and intelligent automation.

This is effectively Rillet's David-versus-Goliath strategy: use AI-native architecture to challenge decades-old enterprise software infrastructure.

Nicolas Kopp's Leadership Philosophy

Kopp's approach to leadership reflects his experience scaling N26 and building Rillet.

Several principles stand out.

Solve a difficult problem

Kopp has spoken about deliberately choosing a difficult mission.

His reasoning is straightforward: building any company is hard, so founders should consider taking on a problem with meaningful impact rather than choosing the easiest market available.

Domain expertise matters

Rillet spent years working deeply with accounting workflows before publicly launching.

The company wasn't built simply because AI was fashionable.

Kopp and his team spent significant time understanding the underlying accounting problems before attempting to automate them.

Move quickly, but build for trust

Financial software cannot tolerate the same level of uncertainty as many consumer applications.

An incorrect accounting entry can have serious consequences.

That is why Rillet's product strategy emphasizes automation alongside controls, auditability, and reliability.

Build for the long term

At Slush 2025, Kopp discussed the importance of distinguishing temporary growth from durable traction and protecting culture while scaling rapidly.

This philosophy has become increasingly relevant as Rillet has moved from startup experimentation into enterprise-scale growth.

The Importance of Trust in AI Finance

One of the biggest challenges facing Kopp is not simply making AI capable.

It is making AI trusted.

Finance teams deal with sensitive information and high-stakes decisions.

A system that generates a marketing email incorrectly may be inconvenient.

A system that generates an incorrect journal entry can affect a company's financial statements.

Rillet therefore has to solve two problems simultaneously:

How do we make accounting automation intelligent?

and

How do we make it trustworthy enough for finance leaders to rely on?

The EY partnership and Rillet's emphasis on controls and audit readiness reflect this challenge.

Nicolas Kopp vs. Traditional ERP Leadership

Kopp's background gives him an unusual perspective on enterprise software.

He is not a career ERP executive.

He comes from investment banking, fintech, and startup operations.

That means he approaches accounting from the perspective of a business operator who experienced the limitations of financial infrastructure firsthand.

His thesis is essentially:

If modern companies can operate in real time, why should their financial systems operate in batches?

That question sits at the center of Rillet's strategy.

Nicolas Kopp – Key Facts

Category	Details
Full Name	Nicolas Kopp
Known As	Nic Kopp
Current Role	Founder & CEO
Company	Rillet
Industry	AI / ERP / FinTech / Enterprise Software
Founded Rillet	2021
Previous Company	N26
N26 Role	U.S. CEO
Earlier Career	Morgan Stanley, Lazard, Goldman Sachs
Education	University of St. Gallen
Graduate Education	London School of Economics
2025 Series A	$25M
2025 Series B	$70M
2026 Series C	$100M
2026 Valuation	$1B
Total Funding	$200M+
2026 Customers	600+
Core Vision	AI-native ERP and continuous financial close
Key Concept	Zero-day close

The career and education details above are supported by Kopp's company biography and independent executive profiles.

The Future of Nicolas Kopp and Rillet

Kopp is now competing in one of enterprise software's largest and most entrenched markets.

The opportunity is enormous.

Accounting is a fundamental function of every business, while ERP systems remain some of the most deeply embedded software platforms in the enterprise.

If AI can genuinely automate large portions of accounting while maintaining accuracy, controls, and auditability, the impact could extend far beyond bookkeeping.

It could change how finance departments are structured.

Instead of finance teams spending large amounts of time collecting, reconciling, and preparing data, AI agents could continuously maintain the financial system while human professionals focus on strategy and judgment.

That is the future Kopp is attempting to build.

Nicolas Kopp's CEO Legacy

Nicolas Kopp's emerging legacy is the attempt to bring the real-time, AI-native philosophy of modern software to one of the oldest functions in business: accounting.

His career has followed a remarkably consistent path.

At Morgan Stanley, he learned traditional finance.

At N26, he experienced the transformation of banking through software.

At Rillet, he is attempting to transform accounting through AI.

The $1 billion valuation reached in 2026 is an important milestone, but it may not be the ultimate measure of Kopp's success.

The bigger question is whether Rillet can make the traditional month-end close feel as outdated as paper banking statements.

If it can, Nicolas Kopp could become one of the executives who helped define the transition from legacy ERP to AI-native enterprise software.

For CEO-Watch, that makes Kopp particularly interesting: he is not simply building another fintech startup. He is attempting to redesign the financial infrastructure that businesses use to understand themselves.