Why we invested in Integral
There are few certainties in life: death, taxes, and the frustration of filing those taxes.
For an accountant or tax advisor, every client mandate comprises dozens of tasks across bank feeds, receipts, contracts and correspondence, arriving in whatever format the client happens to use. A trained clerk works through it, and a licensed adviser reviews the result and signs.
These professionals have become harder to hire, while models have become increasingly capable of doing the work.
The endgame is that this industry will change drastically. Integral will be at the forefront of this, as an AI-native accountancy and tax platform with an affiliated licensed entity in Germany.
With AI eating professional services, we believe that the most valuable companies will be the ones that deliver client outcomes from start to finish – which is why we invested.
We’re proud to co-lead Integral’s Series A with Reid Hoffman, alongside existing investors General Catalyst, Cherry Ventures, and Puzzle Ventures.
The problem
Tax advice and accounting are tightly regulated activities. In Germany, only a licensed advisor (Steuerberater) can conduct them: nothing is filed until one of them has reviewed the work and approved it. There are roughly 90,000 such professionals in the country; their average age is nearly 54, and around a third will reach retirement age this decade. Meanwhile, trainee contracts are declining year-on-year: this is an increasingly supply-constrained market.
Enter Integral
Today, Integral serves German SMBs, and delivers their bookkeeping, tax filing and payroll as a managed service. AI performs intake, classification, reconciliation and first-pass preparation. Qualified professionals review, correct and sign – but most clients’ books are prepared by agents end-to-end. Following their recent partnership with Qonto, we’re excited to see the business go from strength to strength. The platform is maturing rapidly: each of Integral’s professionals can now serve twice as many clients as they could in January.
The team
Lukas Zörner and Anil Can Baykal founded Integral in 2024. Lukas was CPO and Managing Director at Penta through its acquisition by Qonto, then ran Qonto's German business. Anil is a seasoned fintech founder and runs engineering. The two of them are outstanding product-builders, with a keen understanding of their industry and their customers’ needs.
Why now, and where next
To deliver Integral’s service, there is a high bar to clear. An agentic system needs to deliver an output that someone accepting legal liability will sign after review, produced across a long chain of dependent steps from documents that arrive unstructured. These capabilities are only just emerging. At the same time, the input side is being standardised by law. Germany's e-invoicing mandate is now expanding in scope, so the messiest part of the data pipeline is becoming increasingly machine-readable.
This is, of course, a global opportunity. The US faces exactly the same demographic challenge, with CPA exam candidates down 27% over a decade and around 75% of current CPAs near retirement. Agents will transform the profession worldwide, and Integral will be at the bleeding edge of this trend.
We are delighted to be backing Lukas, Anil and the team – and can’t wait to support Integral on its path to global leadership.
