• The startup Nominal raised $20 million to turbocharge financial planning with agentic AI.
• The serial founders sold their last AI startup for $70 million.
• As the number of people becoming accountants declines, AI startups are trying to address that.

Nominal, a New York-based startup seeking to turbocharge financial planning with agentic AI, raised $20 million last month.

The AI startup is arriving at an opportune moment as the number of people becoming Certified Public Accountants (CPAs) is on the decline.

Cofounder and CEO Guy Leibovitz shared the pitch deck the team used to close its Series A. The deck showed how Nominal would use AI to address the accountant shortage and handle manual accounting labor, as the majority of accountants approach retirement and fewer people take the CPA exam.

Nominal's new round brings its total funding to $30 million. Next47 led the round, which included participation from Workday Ventures, Bling Capital, and Hyperwise Ventures. The company declined to share its valuation.

Leibovitz and Nominal's cofounder and CTO, Golan Kopichinsky, previously built another AI startup together in data security, Cognigo, which sold to NetApp for $70 million in 2019.

After the acquisition, Leibovitz saw firsthand much of the manual work NetApp's finance teams struggled with, which inspired the creation of Nominal.

Leibovitz likened Nominal to a hot $5 billion legal tech startup by calling it "Harvey for accountants and finance teams." Nominal plugs into a company's existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and helps CFOs and controllers automate tasks to reduce manual work and errors.

The company said its product can analyze financial forecasts, reconcile balance sheets, and more.

Nominal makes money by selling annual subscriptions based on usage, and Leibovitz said revenue doubled every quarter last year. Funding will go to expanding operations in North America and adding more AI agents to the product.

Nominal has 40 employees, Leibovitz said, and it has dozens of customers, including auto shop chain Jiffy Lube and business travel company GoGlobal.

Nominal isn't alone in disrupting ERP systems with AI. Earlier this month, AI startup Rillet announced it raised $70 million from Andreessen Horowitz and ICONIQ, while Campfire announced a $35 million Series A raise led by Accel in June.

Here's a look at the pitch deck Nominal used to raise its $20 million Series A. Certain slides have been edited and removed so that the deck can be shared publicly.

• AI is transforming Y Combinator, with younger founders and heightened expectations.
• Cohorts are dominated by AI, and the accelerator is incorporating it into internal tools.
• Some startups being similar "enriches the competitive landscape," a YC spokesperson said.

Y Combinator founders are getting younger and are expected to move faster than ever because of AI, recent participants told Business Insider.

Each tenet of the startup incubator's latest requests for startups described companies with AI at their core, and roughly 70 of the 143 startups in the spring batch were focused on agentic AI.

AI is "deep within YC," one founder who recently completed the program and asked not to be identified to speak freely told Business Insider. Cohorts are dominated by AI companies, and the accelerator's internal Bookface platform is increasingly recommending AI tools for founders, they said.

Akash Sharma, the CEO of AI startup Vellum, who was part of the Winter 2023 class, said YC has incorporated helpful AI tools into its Work at a Startup recruitment platform, including candidate matching and personalized outreach text.

Mentors within the program encourage founders to use AI in their workflows and automate rather than hire to keep teams lean, said Cekura founder Sidhant Kabra, who participated in the Fall 2024 cohort. Participants also get early access to beta AI tools from tech giants, such as OpenAI, he said.

The startup world's AI obsession is hardly exclusive to YC, but it's accelerated the program's cadence, some participants said.

In expediting every step in the startup pipeline from vibe coding to R&D to marketing, AI has also ratcheted up expectations that founders should have fully realized products or more customers with bigger contracts by Demo Day, Kabra said.

YC CEO Garry Tan told CNBC earlier this year that revenue for YC batches was growing at an average of 10% week-over-week.

In the past, a founder might be pre-product market fit or have a few users or design partners, Kabra said. Now, "within three months, you're able to close enterprise contracts over $100k," he said. "That's a big change."

Increasingly younger cohorts

Expectations are climbing as the program has become shorter, the first founder who recently completed the program told Business Insider. YC pivoted from a biannual to a quarterly schedule last fall — a move CEO Garry Tan told Bloomberg at the time would result in smaller batches and additional Demo Days.

Founders spoke glowingly of YC, calling the experience transformative, but the pace can have drawbacks.

In optimizing for Demo Day, some participants may not always be making the best long-term decisions for their companies, Kabra said, such as signing lots of customers too fast or ones at a discounted rate.

"If you weren't in YC, you would make different choices," the first founder told Business Insider, saying Demo Day serves as a proof-of-concept. "After Demo Day, there's a classic YC slump — and then you readjust and start building for the long term."

"AI is enabling founders to move faster, and we're here to help them harness that momentum not just for Demo Day, but to build enduring, world-changing companies," a YC spokesperson told Business Insider.

The AI boom has also resulted in increasingly younger cohorts.

YC General Partner Pete Koomen told The New York Times that the median age of YC participants was 24, down from 30 in 2022. Venture capitalist Gabriel Jarrosson wrote on LinkedIn that the number of accepted applicants between ages 18 and 22 was up 110% year-over-year.

Younger entrepreneurs are less entrenched in their ideas and have grown up with AI, founders told Business Insider.

YC is "actively encouraging younger people to come into the fold," Sharma said. He added that YC's public-facing recruitment materials emphasize being a builder above all else. "All you need to do is be able to build good products, and YC will take care of the rest."

Ultimately, the saturation of AI companies within YC has sparked criticism that many of its startups are similar. "You hear the phrase AI agent so much and you're like, my mind is going insane," the first founder said.

But the competition is motivating, Kabra said, given that execution is paramount and consolidation amid the AI gold rush is inevitable.

While many of its startups "may explore similar areas," the YC spokesperson said, that "encourages open-source progress, which in turn, enriches the competitive landscape, gives consumers more choice, and reflects our abundance-oriented view of the future."