Round raises £4.5M seed to automate treasury, payments and payroll

Round, the London-based finance automation startup, has raised £4.5 million (around $6 million) in a seed round led by Munich-based Alstin Capital, with participation from Backed VC and Love Ventures.

Finance teams at growing companies still stitch their work together by hand — approving invoices in one tool, logging into bank portals to make payments, chasing contractors over email, and reconciling the lot in spreadsheets. Each payment run, payroll cycle and cash sweep ends up as a sequence of manual steps rather than a decision. Round's pitch is that the bottleneck is execution, not intelligence, and that finance needs infrastructure that actually moves money rather than another copilot that recommends what to do.

Co-founded in 2023 by Pac O'Shea and Hayyaan Ahmad, the platform sits between banks, ERPs and payment rails, combining wallets and treasury infrastructure with rule-based automation. Customers — including Cleo and PostHog — set parameters such as approval thresholds, payment schedules and cash minimums, and Round executes against them, logging audit trails and syncing back to ERPs. Alongside the funding, the company is launching two new products: an Agentic Workflow Builder, which lets finance teams describe a process in plain English and have it built and run continuously after approval, and Autonomous Payroll, which pulls payslips from existing providers, routes approval, funds the run from treasury and confirms execution end-to-end.

Round says it has processed over $500 million since launching its first automated workflows less than a year ago. The company is ISO 27001:2022 certified and works only with FCA-regulated partners, including custodian relationships with WealthKernel, BlackRock and Barclays. The seed follows a $2.1 million pre-seed in October 2024 led by Passion Capital — an early backer of Monzo, Tide and GoCardless — which doubled down in this round.

Around 10% of Round's existing customers also invested, alongside angels including Paul Forster, co-founder of Indeed. The capital will go toward product development, expanding the engineering and go-to-market teams, deepening bank and ERP integrations, and scaling platform infrastructure. Andreas Schenk, partner at Alstin Capital, framed the bet as backing infrastructure rather than software, calling Round's approach a fundamentally new way for companies to run finance operations rather than an optimisation of existing processes.

Sources

• Soapbox — Round announces its £4.5m seed round
• UKTN — Round raises £4.5m to build its finance automation platform
• The Next Web — London fintech Round closes $6M seed
• Business Cloud — Round's £4.5m seed includes 10% of its customers
• Fintech.global — Round raises $6m seed to automate finance teams with AI