The archive · Money & Fintech · Product decision · 2025–2026
Zalos bets finance agents run the ERP you already have
YC F25's Zalos bets CFOs keep their ERP and hire computer agents instead: record a workflow once, agents run it 24/7; $3.6M seed.
Zalos
What the business is
Builds 'computer agents' for finance teams that log into existing ERPs, CRMs, banking and accounting systems to run billing, close-the-books and reconciliation workflows end-to-end, with human check-ins and audit trails.
Starting capital：$3.6M seed led by 14 Peaks Capital with Cohen Circle, 20VC and angels including FedEx CFO Mike Lenz, Indeed founder Paul Forster and Happy Robot founder Pablo Palafox (announced March 2026).
How it started
William Fairbairn, formerly a general manager at cash-management software group Agicap, and Hung Hoang, who spent five years at Apple Pay, met at Y Combinator and founded Zalos in 2025. Their observation: modern finance teams run on ERPs, CRMs, spreadsheets and banking platforms never designed to talk to each other, so the 'connective tissue' between systems is human. Fairbairn put the pain bluntly — executives get fired for fraud or failed ERP migrations, and nearly everyone he met complained about their ERP — so the founders bet the answer was not another ERP migration but software that operates the systems CFOs already have.
What happened
Zalos's agents log into systems with a username and password, turn screen recordings or simple instructions into automations, and run multi-step workflows such as billing cycles, month-end close and reconciliation. The company says it can run hundreds of agents around the clock, uses visual-based evaluation after every action with real-time troubleshooting, keeps human-in-the-loop check-ins and historical audit trails, and prices per agent rather than per seat. The $3.6M seed, led by 14 Peaks Capital with Cohen Circle and 20VC participating, funds expansion from its existing midmarket ERP customers toward enterprise ERPs and on-premise systems, plus a longer-term 'finance context graph' across a company's systems.
No ending yet — it is still running.
Background
Zalos, founded in 2025 by William Fairbairn and Hung Hoang after they met at Y Combinator's Fall 2025 batch, is betting that the next leap in finance productivity will not come from replacing the ERP stack but from AI agents that operate it the way humans do. Fairbairn came from Agicap, where he ran a finance software business; Hoang spent five years at Apple Pay before concluding that missing APIs were the real obstacle to finance automation.
The company's computer agents log into existing ERP, CRM and banking systems with credentials, turn screen recordings or written instructions into automations, and run repetitive, multi-step work — billing cycles, month-end close, reconciliation, data entry into password-protected portals. Zalos says it can deploy hundreds of agents in parallel around the clock, validates every action visually and can troubleshoot in real time, checks in with human counterparts when something is ambiguous, and keeps audit trails for regulators. It prices per agent rather than per seat.
The bet is a third path for CFOs tired of their software: not an AI-native ERP migration, which Fairbairn calls a common way executives lose their jobs, and not waiting for vendors to connect systems that were never designed to interoperate. Instead, Zalos sits on top of the existing stack, starting in midmarket ERPs where it already had paying customers at the time of its seed announcement in March 2026.
The $3.6M seed was led by 14 Peaks Capital with Cohen Circle, 20VC and angels including FedEx CFO Mike Lenz and Indeed founder Paul Forster. The company plans to use the capital to move from midmarket to enterprise ERPs and on-premise systems, and to build a finance context graph across a company's systems that future agents run on. The open question is whether enterprises will trust agents with credential-based access to systems of record before the category has proven audit-grade reliability at scale.
What has to be true
- ERP, CRM, banking and spreadsheet systems were never designed to talk to each other, leaving finance staff as the manual integration layer.
- CFOs fear ERP migrations more than they fear new software, so an agent layer on top of the existing stack faces less sales resistance.
- Turning a screen recording into an automation lowers the barrier: customers show the work once instead of writing API integrations.
- Human-in-the-loop check-ins and audit trails address the compliance and trust requirements of high-stakes finance operations.
- Paying customers in midmarket ERPs plus CFO and founder angels (FedEx CFO Mike Lenz, Indeed founder Paul Forster) signal real demand.
What can be applied
Sell into the systems customers hate but will not replace: agents that log in and do the manual stitching, with audit trails and human check-ins, beat a rip-and-replace pitch.
Aftermath
As of March 24, 2026, Zalos is based in San Francisco and London with computer agents live at paying customers across major midmarket ERPs. The $3.6M seed — led by 14 Peaks Capital with Cohen Circle, 20VC and finance and founder angels — funds expansion into enterprise ERPs and on-premise systems, further development of its visual-validation and self-healing agent stack, and a longer-term finance context graph across customers' systems. No customer names, ARR or usage figures had been disclosed.
Sources
- Agents for finance startup Zalos raises $3.6M to transform finance departments
- Zalos raises $3.6M to develop ERP computer agents that operate finance systems like humans
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