Sifted ran an interview on Tuesday with Jonathan Sanders, chief executive and cofounder of the Copenhagen finance software startup Light, under the headline that he plans on "taking on US rivals" with his AI CFO startup. I should say up front that the piece sits behind Sifted's Pro paywall. I could read the headline, the standfirst and the first paragraph. The rest came through scrambled.
What I could read is still useful. The standfirst says "Balderton-backed Light announced its US expansion last year". The opening line goes back to 2018, when Sanders joined the spend management company Pleo as head of payments, at a time when "the vertical was becoming an increasingly crowded space in European tech". So I rebuilt the story from the funding releases and earlier coverage, all of which I could open.
TechCrunch's 2024 profile fills in the CV. Sanders left his head of payments job at Pleo in 2020 and founded Juni, a finance tools company for e-commerce businesses that went on to raise north of 280 million dollars, before he left it in 2022. TechCrunch says he incorporated Light in 2023. The Balderton release from 2025 says Light was founded in 2022. I cannot reconcile those two dates from outside. My guess is that the work started in 2022 and the company was registered a year later.
Light exited stealth in June 2024 with a 13 million dollar seed round led by Atomico. Cherry Ventures, Entrée Capital and Seedcamp joined, and TechCrunch lists the German footballer Mario Götze among the angels. Its early customers were Nordic: Worksome, Lenus, Famly and Proxify.
The round Sifted refers to closed in September 2025. Balderton Capital led a 30 million dollar Series A, with Atomico, Cherry Ventures, Seedcamp and Entrée Capital following, and angels including Thomas Wolf of Hugging Face and Charles Songhurst, a Meta board member. That took total funding to 43 million dollars. EU-Startups converted the same round to 25 million euros and the total to 36 million euros.
The release makes big claims. It says Light processes 280 million records in under a second, that the company grew 30 times in the 12 months before the round, and that customers cut finance operations time by 84% after leaving older ERP systems. These are the company's numbers. I have not seen an audit of any of them, and the release does not give revenue.
Sanders put the pitch in one line in that release. "We're not patching old systems with chatbots," he said. He added a sharper sentence I have not seen many founders write down: "Companies shouldn't have to spend $50,000 and 5 months just to expand into a new country." Rob Moffat, the Balderton partner, said Light was rebuilding "the general ledger from scratch instead of bolting onto legacy systems".
Fintech Futures reported the use of funds. The Series A was to open a New York office "to meet client demand", triple the engineering team by Q2 2026 and build a process optimisation workbench. It also lists JP Morgan, Adyen and BDO Global as partners. That Q2 deadline has passed. I could not find a public update on whether the team did triple.
The US rivals in the Sifted headline are not named in the part I could read. TechCrunch in 2024 named the systems Light wanted to replace: Oracle NetSuite, SAP ERP and Microsoft Dynamics, plus the younger QuickBooks and Xero. I suspect the interview names at least some of them. I will not guess which.
Everything about current revenue, customer counts in the US and any new round sits in the locked part of the Sifted piece, if it is there at all. I have not found a 2026 funding announcement from Light. The most recent number I can confirm is the 43 million dollar total from September 2025, more than a year old now. The first thing I would ask Sanders for is the 2026 revenue line.