mika raises €6M seed to automate accounting for German SMEs

Berlin-based mika has raised a EUR 6M seed round led by London’s Smedvig Ventures to scale an AI-native financial operating system that runs bookkeeping, VAT returns, annual accounts and tax filings for German small companies.

Nowhere in Europe does a small company spend more of its life proving its books are in order than in Germany – and that burden is exactly what makes this round worth reading closely. The compliance culture that buries a GmbH in receipts also produces the most structured, most rule-bound paperwork on the continent, which is to say: the most automatable. Below, I lay out the round, the traction behind it, and the two competing bets now being placed on who automates the Mittelstand’s back office.

A London lead and the studiVZ bench

mika announced its EUR 6M seed on 23 September 2026, led by Smedvig Ventures, the London firm that concentrates its cheques on early-stage European B2B software. New backers include Wecken & Cie, the Basel family office investing through its Care4 AG vehicle, and a bench of German operator angels: Dennis Bemmann and Michael Brehm, the co-founders of studiVZ, limango founder Johannes Ditterich, and Martina Pfeifer of encourageventures.

Keen Venture Partners and Dutch Founders Fund, who backed the EUR 800k pre-seed alongside Slimmer AI in June 2024, both increased their stakes, taking mika’s disclosed total to roughly EUR 6.8M. The new money goes into growth hiring, compliance, platform stability and cybersecurity, per the company’s announcement.

There is a pleasing symmetry in this cap table: founder and CEO Agnieszka Walorska was employee number seven at studiVZ, and the German internet’s class of 2005 is now writing cheques for its class of 2024.

From 400 to 750 companies in nine months

Walorska founded mika in Berlin in 2024 with CFO Lukas Linnekuhle and CTO Henry Müssemann, after building digital consultancy Creative Construction and selling it to Capco. The product is not another receipt scanner. It is a financial operating system for Germany’s GmbHs and UGs: it reads receipts, categorises transactions, files VAT pre-registrations, prepares annual accounts and handles tax filings, keeping human review where German law demands it. A connector built on the Model Context Protocol lets founders query their own books from AI assistants – ask your ledger a question instead of writing your adviser an email.

The traction is the story. The company says it now runs the books for more than 750 GmbHs and UGs, up from around 400 at the start of 2026, with annualised revenue crossing EUR 1M in the summer and growing more than 20% month on month – all company figures, delivered by a team of 22. The customer base has spread beyond digital-first startups into SaaS, property, e-commerce, retail and the trades.

The dullest software category is growing at 44.6%

The market mika sells into is anything but small. AI in accounting is worth USD 10.87bn in 2026 and is projected to reach USD 68.75bn by 2031, a 44.6% CAGR (Mordor Intelligence, September 2026). Germany alone counts nearly one million small incorporated businesses that must keep compliant books, per the company’s announcement, and the country’s phased e-invoicing mandate – reception obligatory since January 2025, issuance following through 2028 – is turning that paperwork machine-readable by law. Remember: every regulation that standardises a document also trains the model that will read it.

For scale, look at the cheques written around it this week alone: Benford raised a EUR 5M pre-seed for AI audit infrastructure with Firstminute Capital and Global Founders Capital co-leading, Primo took EUR 6.9M for AI agents in corporate IT, and Zeliq added EUR 7M for its AI sales agent. Seed-stage Europe is funding agents for every back office, one function at a time.

Replace the adviser or buy the firm

Two theses now compete for the same German paperwork. Earlier this month, fellow Berliners Limetax raised EUR 6M in equity plus a EUR 30M credit facility, led by Motive Partners, to acquire independent tax firms and retrofit them with AI. mika takes the opposite route: sell the software directly to the company and make the adviser optional. One buys the incumbents; the other routes around them.

So which model wins? The honest answer is that both can. The roll-up captures the companies that will never leave their adviser; the operating system captures the founders who never wanted one. What we are watching for is the crossover point – the moment a bank or an auditor accepts AI-prepared accounts as readily as adviser-prepared ones. When that happens, the market stops being segmented by trust and starts being segmented by price, and software wins on price every time. Every round in this space lands in our fundraising data as it happens.

The good news is that Europe’s least glamorous software category has quietly become one of its fastest growing. The books are learning to close themselves – watch who the Mittelstand trusts to do it!