Scaleup Finance raises £3M to launch Nume, an AI CFO for startups and SMEs

Copenhagen-based CFO-services company, Scaleup Finance, has secured £3 million to launch Nume, an AI CFO positioned to address the financial leadership gap faced by 50 million SMEs globally. 

While CFOs are standard in larger businesses, nearly 50 million SMEs globally lack a proper finance function, relying heavily on manual processes, spreadsheets, and limited access to financial expertise.

Scaleup Finance aims to address this gap with Nume. which acts as a CFO for small and mid-sized businesses, answering complex financial questions, preparing reports, and proactively guiding founders on the health of their business through their familiar communication channels like Email, Slack etc.

I spoke to CEO and co-founder Alexander Sonne Wulff to learn all about it.

Sonne Wulff has been a founder throughout his whole career. He started back in 2010 with a deep tech company developing a new type of concrete material. 

Of all things, they decided to reinvent concrete, and he recalled "everyone told us we would fail because I’m not an engineer. I studied at Copenhagen Business School. But the product turned out to be both greener and cheaper."

"We used to joke that if we could sell a contractor a product that emitted 5 per cent more CO₂ but saved 20 per cent in cost, they would always choose it.

The incentive structure was very much like that back then — and, honestly, it still is to a degree. Anyway, the company ended up doing really well. I was there for 11 years, scaling it into the US and across Europe."

“I’m building the product I always wished I’d had as a founder”

When he exited in 2021, he wanted to solve one of the biggest and hardest problems he’d faced personally — financial management. He teamed up with my two co-founders to start Scaleup Finance. Sonne Wulff recounts: 

“Every time I met other founders at events, the same topic came up — managing finances was a recurring pain point.

For many, the CEO or founder is effectively the CFO, even though that’s not their area of expertise.  That’s the problem we set out to solve when we started Scaleup Finance in 2021."

“We’re six in total — three of us entrepreneurs and the others with finance and tech backgrounds. We’d all experienced the same challenge: managing our own company finances without the right tools."

Inside the financial black box 

The most common financial challenges faced by startups and SMEs are cash management and visibility — questions like “When will we run out of cash?” or “How accurate is our forecast?”

Sonne Wulff admits, “I’ve probably had hundreds, maybe even close to a thousand meetings with founders, and so many have said, “I have no idea how we’re performing.”

"When I ask, “Do you get a monthly report to see how you did last month?” they often say no. Their process is literally logging into their bank account to check the balance."

He sees this as the biggest warning sign.

“A lot of founders call finance a “black box.”They know they need to handle it but have no idea what to look for. If you map out how most early-stage companies operate, you’ll usually see one person — the founder or CEO — doing everything.

Then they hire an outsourced bookkeeping provider or accountant to handle two things: bookkeeping and payroll, because they legally have to. Everything else is left to the founder.”

Building investor trust starts with the numbers

Significantly, for startups with external funding — grants, angels, or VCs — there’s another layer of reporting and accountability.

Sonne Wulff often tells founders that “finance is like your internal steering wheel — you need a good grip on it to make decisions.

"But it’s also what builds trust with investors. The external reporting component is huge. Investors need confidence that you’re managing their capital responsibly.

Even if you’re not actively fundraising, maintaining that transparency with your current investors lays the groundwork for your next round.”

Open banking created more complexity

Scaleup Finance is a combination of service and technology. According to Sonne Wulff, when the team started in 2021, they saw that there were plenty of startups focusing on bookkeeping, payroll, expense management, and payments — all important but very operational. 

According to Sonne Wulff, “Nobody was tackling the strategic side: budgeting, forecasting, and decision-making.” “When I started my previous company, my financial tools were very fragmented. I had a cloud accounting system, a payroll system, but also stacks of paper invoices because some clients still wanted them sent by mail. This was only about 10 years ago!”

The rise of open banking in 2015 saw an explosion of fintech — expense management tools, corporate cards, payroll platforms. Everything moved to the cloud.

But according to Sonne Wulff, “what happened was that I now had all my transactional data spread across multiple cloud tools, all with APIs, and I was exporting CSV files every month to rebuild a master spreadsheet just to understand performance."

"It was ridiculous. I’d spend hours every month reconciling data manually in Excel — making mistakes, updating forecasts — and every founder I spoke to said the same. Everyone had “the spreadsheet.” So we decided to focus on that top layer: the strategic financial management part.

It’s harder to build than a basic accounting tool because it requires deep accuracy and context.”

Scaleup Finance was inspired by Palantir’s model — embedding domain experts deeply within the product. 

“We realised that to succeed, we’d need financial professionals in-house to help build the technology. So we started as a tech-enabled CFO service, offering an end-to-end solution where human CFOs are supported by automation,” shared Sonne Wulff.

Nume is built on four years of Scaleup Finance’s CFO-as-a-Service experience, including 40 CFOs working with more than 500 high-growth startups across Europe. The team has condensed thousands of hours of learning and knowledge into a tool for every SME to use. It connects directly to banking and accounting systems to deliver CFO-level insights in minutes - from liquidity forecasts to board-ready reports, and proactively surfaces risks and opportunities in real time. ​​

Over the past year, Nume has been tested in private beta with a select group of companies, refining its capabilities in real-world conditions.

Already, more than 2,500 companies from 80 countries have signed up for the launch. 

According to Sonne Wulff, “For larger companies or those with very complex audits, you still need a person involved. But for the long tail of SMEs, Nume delivers professional-grade financial management without the cost of hiring a CFO.” How

Scaleup Finance hit €1M ARR without a single euro in marketing

Scaleup Finance’s biggest source of growth has always been word of mouth. In our first year, it went from zero to €1 million in ARR without doing any marketing at all.

“I remember coming back from summer vacation just a few months after we launched,” recounts Sonne Wulff.

“We had automated the monthly reporting process, producing beautiful reports that clients could export as PDFs. These reports said “Powered by Scaleup Finance” at the bottom and looked like something out of a Fortune 500 board deck.”

Clients started sharing them with their boards and investors — and then those investors started calling, saying, “I just received this report from one of my portfolio companies. It’s the best monthly report I’ve ever seen. Tell me more about what you’re doing.” That created a powerful organic flywheel for growth.

Helping founders sleep better at night

According to Sonne Wulff, “What we hear most is: “I finally feel on top of my finances.”

“It sounds simple, but for many founders it’s transformative. Finance goes from being a source of anxiety to something under control. A lot of our clients talk about finally sleeping better at night because the “black box” has been opened.

Even personally, when I was a founder, I took a master’s in finance and accounting — not because I loved it, but because I thought it would help me make better strategic decisions.

Even then, I was never 100 per cent sure I was doing things correctly. That constant uncertainty is stressful. So when our clients tell us they finally feel confident about their numbers, it’s exactly why we started the company.”

Global accessibility for SMEs and startups

Nume brings the cost of professional financial management down tenfold, making it accessible to thousands of smaller companies. And it’s global from day one with a logical UX: onboarding takes about five minutes. You connect your bank and accounting systems, answer a few simple questions, and Nume immediately starts working.

"The first thing it says is something like, “Hi, I’m your AI CFO. I’ve analysed your data and created a tailored financial plan and a list of tasks I’ll handle for you.” Then users can choose to communicate via Slack or email," shared Sonne Wulff.

Nume proactively monitors finances, sends monthly reports, flags issues like growing receivables, and keeps everything running smoothly.

“We’ve spent more than a year building what I call the most sophisticated financial brain for SMEs. The hardest challenge was accuracy — large language models are great with text, but when it comes to numbers, they tend to hallucinate,” shared Sonne Wulff.

“We solved that by creating a multi-agent setup: splitting complex tasks across specialised AI agents, each with the right tools and validation processes. That’s how we achieved 100 per cent accuracy. Most AI adoption so far has been in text-based use cases — sales, customer support, legal — but not in numerical, data-driven work like finance. Our architecture finally makes that possible.”

For Sonne Wulff, Nume's proactiveness stands out. "Most tools wait for users to ask questions, but most founders don’t even know what to ask. Nume behaves like a real CFO,” shared Sonne Wulff. 

After onboarding, Nume immediately creates a plan and starts sending tailored updates — “Here’s your monthly report,” or “Hey, your receivables are climbing.” It’s an active financial partner, not just a reactive tool.

Sonne Wulff asserts, “We’ve basically tried to mimic an entire CFO job description — and automate it. That proactivity is the key difference between a chatbot and an actual AI CFO.”

The round was led by a syndicate of European investors, including Mainset (UK), Circlerock (Ireland), North Ventures (Denmark), Crowberry (Iceland), Inveready (Spain), and SeedX (Liechtenstein), alongside angels such as former Google UK Managing Director Dan Cobley.

With the funding, Scaleup Finance is now bringing Nume to the global market making CFO-level support accessible to millions of SMEs for the first time.

“SMEs are the backbone of the global economy, yet most still lack access to the financial leadership they need. With Nume, Scaleup Finance is opening up CFO-level capabilities to millions of businesses worldwide. With a proven founding team, we believe Nume can set a new standard for how SMEs worldwide run their businesses,” says Mikkel Rørvig, Partner at North Ventures.