Integral raises €18M Series A to build the AI accounting firm for European SMEs

Integral (Berlin) has raised €18 million in a Series A co-led by Mosaic Ventures and Reid Hoffman, with Cherry Ventures, General Catalyst, and Puzzle Ventures participating. Founded in 2024 by Lukas Zörner (CEO) and Anil Can Baykal, the company is building an AI-native accounting and tax firm that combines AI agents with licensed German tax professionals — not software sold to accountants, but a firm that delivers accounting, payroll, and tax filing directly to small and medium-sized businesses.

The distinction matters. At Integral, AI agents handle bookkeeping end-to-end for more than half of clients today, compressing turnaround times from weeks to hours. Licensed professionals at Integral Tax review every output, sign off, and carry full legal responsibility for the result. The company's pitch is that this structure — AI execution plus professional accountability — is the only model that satisfies German compliance requirements while addressing the structural shortage of tax professionals.

The accountant supply problem

Germany counts roughly 100,000 licensed Steuerberater to serve around 3.5 million SMEs. The profession is not growing: enrolment in the qualifying examination has been flat for years, and the average practitioner age continues to rise. The practical result is that access to timely, affordable accounting support is rationed — small businesses either pay premium rates for a generalist's attention or wait weeks for basic filings.

Software tools have not solved this. Every German accountant already uses ERP platforms and filing software; the constraint is licensed professionals, not the tools they work with. Integral's claim is that AI agents, supervised by a professional liability layer, remove the bottleneck without removing the accountability that German tax law requires.

Zörner: "Software doesn't file your business's taxes. It doesn't run your payroll and it doesn't sign your annual accounts. A licensed professional does, and there are fewer of them every year. So instead of building yet another tool for professionals, we built the firm itself: AI agents do the work, licensed experts stand behind every result."

What the round funds

The €18 million goes toward three parallel tracks. First, headcount on the AI engineering side — building out the agents' capacity to handle payroll, annual accounts, and more complex tax scenarios. Second, hiring more licensed tax professionals at Integral Tax to scale the supervisory layer. Third, commercial expansion to bring more SMEs onto the platform.

General Catalyst's participation is notable: the US firm co-led Complir's $11 million Seed this same week, a Copenhagen startup using AI to automate product compliance for retailers. Both investments sit inside the same thesis — AI agents eliminating professional-services headcount in regulated European workflows — and General Catalyst is evidently moving deliberately on it.

Cherry Ventures, Berlin's early-stage generalist, has the German SME-software market in its portfolio DNA. Mosaic Ventures is a London-based early-stage firm known for backing category-defining B2B software businesses; Integral is its first German-market accounting bet of this scale.

The 18-month question is whether the model holds at scale — specifically, whether licensed-professional supervision remains economically viable as AI handles an ever-larger share of the workload, or whether the supervision layer becomes the new bottleneck Integral has set out to solve.