Zalos Raises $3.6M Seed to Automate Finance Operations with AI Agents
Finance teams don’t break all at once. It’s slower than that. A formula gets patched, a reconciliation gets delayed, another login gets shared, and before long the system meant to create order starts negotiating with disorder. William Fairbairn and Hung Hoang looked at that slow drift and decided to stop managing it and start executing through it.
Zalos, out of San Francisco with roots tied neatly back to the UK, just pulled in $3.6M in seed funding, led by 14 Peaks with Cohen Circle and 20VC in the mix, plus a bench of operators who actually know what it feels like to sign off on a balance sheet. Not tourists. People who have lived inside the Office of the CFO and came back with stories.
William Fairbairn, Co-founder and CEO, spent years in the trenches with CFOs who were promised sleek ERP dreams and handed spreadsheet purgatory. Hung Hoang, Co-founder and CTO, built at Apple Pay where scale is not a buzzword, it is oxygen. One saw the pain. The other knew how to build around it. Y Combinator F25 was the meeting point, but the real spark was simpler. Finance teams do not need another dashboard. They need something that actually does the work.
Zalos trains computer agents from screen recordings. Not theory. Not another integration pitch deck. These agents log in, move through NetSuite, Sage, SAP S 4HANA, touch Excel, fire through email, and handle workflows like billing and reconciliations with a full audit trail watching every step. It is less about replacing systems and more about finally making them behave.
They already have customers running on major midmarket ERPs, which tells you everything you need to know. If you can survive that environment, you can scale anywhere. SOC 2 compliance, enterprise grade controls, and the ability to operate without begging for perfect APIs puts them in a lane most companies talk about but never reach.
The play here is not flashy. It is surgical. Instead of ripping out the finance stack, Zalos slides in and starts doing the job. Quietly. Consistently. Like the one operator in the room who does not talk much but somehow closes the books faster than everyone else.
For founders and operators paying attention, there is a lesson sitting right on the surface. The biggest opportunities are not always in building something new. Sometimes they are in finally making what already exists actually work.
And if you are selling into finance, understand this. CFOs do not buy hype. They buy accuracy, control, and sleep. Zalos is selling all three, and they are doing it by turning software into something that does not just assist, but executes.
