Silverfin, a ‘connected accounting platform,’ raises $4.5M Series A led by Index

Silverfin, a startup out of Ghent, Belgium (of all places) that offers a “connected accounting platform” to help businesses stay on top of their financial data, has picked up $4.5 million in Series A funding.

Index Ventures led the round, with participation from existing investors, while the cash injection will be used to expand the team and build out the company’s international presence, starting with the U.K.

Founded in 2013, Silverfin’s platform plugs into popular accounting software and other financial data sources to help finance departments, accountancy firms and consultants, such as external tax specialists, get much better real-time visibility of a company’s financial data.

Or another way to describe it might be “Salesforce for financial data,” since stakeholders can communicate via the platform, too.

The idea is to consolidate (or rely less on) myriad legacy and fragmented financial software tools, applications and, of course, Excel spreadsheets, and in turn reduce the tendency for error, including automatically flagging anomalies. It’s also designed to make generating reports, such as those that are required quarterly or yearly, a lot less painful and updatable in real time.

I’m told that 64,000 businesses already manage their finances on Silverfin, either directly or via an accountancy firm. The latter includes Deloitte, the well-known audit, consulting, tax and advisory firm.

“Ultimately we’re building a central nervous system for financial advisory and services firms, paving the way for us to become the first real-time monitor of businesses’ financial data,” says Silverfin co-founder Joris Van Der Gucht in a statement.

Adds Jan Hammer, partner at Index Ventures: “Fully automating data collection and reconciliation has been described as ‘the holy grail’ of accounting, because it will transform the financial advisory, accounting and auditing sectors. With Silverfin’s ability to integrate with existing software and provide a central data reconciliation platform, Tim, Joris and the team have a huge opportunity to become the gold standard solution for connected accounting.