Microsoft Alumni Score Funding to Build AI Agents for Finance

Hyphenate Inc. has raised $45 million in a funding round led by Nexus Venture Partners, securing capital for an effort to create AI agents that can run finances for businesses.

The two-year-old startup drew investors including B Capital Group US LLC to its Series A round, joined by existing backers Foundation Capital LLC and BoldCap Ventures LLC. The New York-headquartered firm known previously as Maximor has now raised $54 million in total.

Founded in 2024 by Ramnandan Krishnamurthy and Ajay Krishna Amudan, the startup competes with the likes of Ramp to develop artificial intelligence platforms for financial services. Hyphenate customizes AI agents to handle the books for clients including online marketplace Groupon Inc. and AI video avatar startup Synthesia Ltd.

Its agents deal with orders, invoicing and refunds for ice cream maker Mini Melts USA Inc. — within months, they were handling the equivalent of over 16,000 hours of annual finance work, the startup said in a statement. AI agents are designed to carry out multi-step tasks with minimal intervention. Hyphenate’s escalate to actual finance teams when human judgment is required, the firm said.

Hyphenate, which employs about a third of its engineering team in Bangalore, will use the new capital to expand more deeply into accounting and strategic finance. “Our proprietary reinforcement learning algorithm learns from the financial history of our customer,” said Krishnamurthy, who’s also the startup’s chief executive officer. “That becomes the brain of the self-improving AI agent.”

Read More: Ramp Hits $60 Billion Valuation in $1.85 Billion Funding Round

Artificial intelligence is quickly advancing beyond the chatbot era. AI agents now analyze markets, reconcile accounts and help banks and asset managers lessen grunt work in areas from compliance to risk surveillance. Yet fears persist about whether autonomous systems can be trusted with sensitive functions, or the potential for humans to lose control of the technology.

Krishnamurthy and Amudan — both now 32 — met while studying for their Masters in computer science at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. They sold their student startup and then worked at Microsoft Corp.’s US headquarters for seven years before founding Hyphenate.

Their startup has grown revenue 86 times since its $9 million seed financing about 13 months ago, they said.

“Once a team sees our AI handle one workflow to auditors’ satisfaction, they give it the next task and then the next,” the co-founder said.