Round raises $6m to take its treasury software into payroll

Round, a London-based finance automation company, has raised a $6m (£4.5m) seed round led by Alstin Capital, a Munich venture firm, in an announcement dated 10 April that was reported on 13 April. Backed VC and Love Ventures joined the round, as did angel investors including Paul Forster, co-founder of the jobs site Indeed. Passion Capital, which led Round’s pre-seed, increased its stake. Round also said that around 10% of its existing customers invested.

Customers buying equity in a supplier is unusual, and Round’s customers are finance teams. Round says its platform is used by Cleo and PostHog, among others. Its website, as archived on 5 March, carried case studies from RoomZero, an asset management software provider, from a fractional finance executive and from two venture firms, Passion Capital and Tiny VC. Both venture firms also backed Round’s $2.1m (£1.6m) pre-seed round in October 2024, as Silicon Canals reported at the time.

Round Technologies Limited and its sister company Round Financial Limited were incorporated at Companies House in January 2023, under a holding company that the two founders, Pac O’Shea and Hayyaan Ahmad, set up in November 2022 and still control. O’Shea is co-founder and chief executive; Ahmad is the other co-founder. O’Shea told Silicon Canals in 2024 that the idea came from consulting for a large European bank that offered cash management only to businesses with more than £100m, and from hearing, as a venture partner, how badly startups were served by their banks; the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank added to the case. By 2024, Round’s core product let startups earn interest on idle cash through BlackRock money market funds, with next-day access, and see all their bank accounts in one place.

The seed round pays for a move from holding a company’s cash to spending it. The two products launched alongside it, Autonomous Payroll and an Agentic Workflow Builder, put Round’s software in charge of payroll runs and supplier payments. A late salary payment is a bigger problem for a finance team than a money market sweep that earns a little less than planned, and the customers who invested are the clearest sign Round has that its users will let it take that step.

From parking cash to paying people

The model Round describes is rules-based. Finance teams set approval thresholds, payment schedules and cash minimums, and Round carries them out: payments go out, idle cash earns yield and payroll is funded and paid, with everything synced back to the accounting system. Round says it works alongside a company’s existing banks and accounting software, and its home page in March said it connected to more than 2,000 banks.

Autonomous Payroll pulls payslips from a company’s payroll provider, prepares the run, routes it to the right person for approval, funds it from treasury, pays it and confirms when it is done. The workflow builder lets a CFO describe a process in plain English, such as funding payroll early or chasing contractors for missing invoices, and Round builds the workflow for approval. It is in early access with selected customers.

O’Shea frames the pitch against the rest of the market. “Everyone’s trying to build an AI CFO. 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,” he said in the announcement.

Infrastructure as the selling point

Round’s claim to be different from a finance chatbot rests on what it owns: wallets, payment rails and treasury, rather than a layer of software that suggests next steps for a person to carry out. Andreas Schenk, a partner at Alstin Capital, said that Round “understands that true finance automation requires infrastructure, not just software”. Companies House records show Schenk joined the board of Round’s holding company in October 2025.

The figures behind the pitch come from Round itself. It says it launched its first automated workflows less than a year ago and has processed more than $500m (£380m) since. It says it holds ISO 27001:2022 certification and works only with partners regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), with every transaction logged in an audit trail.

Ahmad described how the workflow builder works. “A finance team can describe work they do as steps, the system builds a workflow, they approve it, and it runs forever in the background,” he said.

A customer list built on startups

The customers Round names are, for now, mostly venture-backed companies and the funds that back them. That fits a business that began by managing startups’ idle cash, and it fits a cap table where Passion Capital and Tiny VC sit on both sides of the relationship. Round has not said which customers took part in the seed round or how much they put in.

The money goes on product development, more engineers and go-to-market staff, deeper integrations with banks and financial systems and more infrastructure, the company says, along with hackathons, workshops and webinars for finance teams. Round says the events are designed to help teams discover and build automated workflows of their own.

The round shows that Round’s existing customers will back its move from treasury into payroll and payments with their own money. It does not yet show a finance team at a larger, older business handing its payroll run to software. For now the evidence is a $500m processing figure and a customer list drawn from venture-backed companies and the funds that back them.