Round raises $6M to automate the finance workflows that still require a human to press a button

The London fintech, used by Cleo and PostHog, has closed a seed round led by Alstin Capital, with Backed VC and Love Ventures participating. The co-founder of Indeed also joined as an angel. Passion Capital, an early backer of Monzo, Tide, and GoCardless, doubled its investment.

Round, a London fintech that automates treasury management, payments, payroll, and FX for finance teams at fast-growing companies, has closed a $6 million seed round.

The round was led by Alstin Capital, with participation from Backed VC and Love Ventures. Around 10% of Round’s existing customers also invested in the round, alongside new angels including Paul Forster, co-founder of Indeed.

Passion Capital, which led Round’s $2.1 million pre-seed round in October 2024 and is an early backer of Monzo, Tide, and GoCardless, doubled down on its investment.

Round was founded by Pac O’Shea and Hayyaan Ahmad. Its platform sits between a company’s existing banks, ERP systems, and payment rails, orchestrating cash flows automatically rather than prompting finance teams to execute individual steps.

Finance teams set the parameters, approval thresholds, payment schedules, minimum cash balances, and Round executes: payments go out, idle cash earns yield in treasury accounts, payroll is funded and paid. Customers include Cleo, the AI-driven money management app, and PostHog, the product analytics platform. 

The new funding coincides with the launch of two products. The first is an Agentic Workflow Builder: finance teams describe the workflow they want automated in plain English, Round generates it for approval, and once signed off the workflow runs continuously, alerting teams via Slack, WhatsApp, or email only when a decision is required.

The second is Autonomous Payroll: Round pulls payslips from the company’s existing payroll provider, routes approval to the right person, funds the run from treasury, executes payment, and confirms completion, eliminating the multi-system process most companies currently use for each payroll cycle.

O’Shea described the company’s positioning with a deliberate analogy to software tooling: “Cursor didn’t get big by replacing the CTO. It got big by doing the work which engineers didn’t want to do. We’re taking the same approach, but for finance.”

The reference is to Cursor’s AI coding assistant, which automates the repetitive scaffolding of software development without removing the engineer from the decision loop.

Andreas Schenk, partner at Alstin Capital, said Round was “positioned between banks, ERPs, and payment rails and orchestrates cash flows in real time”, a fundamentally new approach to finance operations rather than an optimisation of existing processes.