The Belgian AI platform for accounting firms, Ravical, has raised a $17 million seed round led by MMC Ventures.
Existing investors, Lakestar, and Antwerp-based Pitchdrive also took part in the seed round, alongside new investor Shapers, bringing Ravical’s total funding to $25 million. For Ravical, the round is the latest chapter in a story written by partners whose paths kept crossing – from a Ghent café to a dinner table in Brussels, and now, the deal table.
The first pair is Joris Van Der Gucht and Tim Vandecasteele. Joris was frustrated by the repetitive tasks in accountancy and wanted to digitise accountants’ work, but had no one to build it. He and Tim (an engineer) were in the same 2011 cohort of Bryo, Voka’s network for young entrepreneurs, but didn’t know each other until Coordinator Hilde Schuddinck suggested they talk. They met at café René over a few Duvels, and programmed their first basic modules that same evening.
In 2013, the duo founded Silverfin. The company’s M&A history introduced the second twosome in 2021, when it bought Boltzmann, the AI company co-founded by Ken Bastiaensen and Benjamin Vandermarliere in 2018.
After Silverfin became an M&A target itself in 2023 – when Norwegian software group Visma bought it, in what Voka called one of Belgium’s largest tech deals in recent years, earning Joris and Tim "Voka Legends" titles that December – Joris (CEO) joined up with Ken (CTO) and Benjamin (CPO) and founded Ravical in February 2025.
Lakestar led a €7.3 million pre-seed round that May, when Ravical was building AI agents for expert firms across accounting, tax, insurance, HR and legal. It has since narrowed that focus to accounting and tax. Tim backed his former partner as an angel investor.
The third twain comes together at a Fintech Founders Dinner in Brussels with Chift (in November 2024), organised by its backers, Shapers and Entourage. Initially, Joris had been invited to attend the dinner on behalf of Ravical, but he was unavailable and sent Tim in his stead. Tim subsequently became a limited partner in Shapers, whose $75 million first fund is backed by more than 60 fintech founders and operators.
Once Ravical was up and running, Tim told Shapers co-founder Philippe Teixeira da Mota about the “incredibly ambitious problems” his former partner set out to solve and two years later, the fund is “thrilled to finally be backing” the company. “We spent a long time mapping the AI disruption coming to professional services firms, and Ravical stood out [for its] differentiated vision in a segment where that’s rare, as well as a team that seems handpicked for these problems,” Philippe notes.
Radical ambitions
MMC Ventures partner Mina Samaan believes accounting has yet to see the transformative moment legal tech has had with companies like Harvey and Legora, but concurs that Ravical presents an opportunity. “Most of the AI startups we’ve met in the space are building point solutions for a single task or workflow. We don’t believe the winners will be the firms that replace their people. Rather, they’ll be the ones that make their best people count across every client,” she says.
According to Philippe, the shift has already started:
“Accounting work is commoditising fast, talent is getting older and scarcer, and a wave of PE-backed roll-ups is creating multi-office groups with a clear mandate to transform through technology.”
“AI is changing what clients expect from their accountants, and firms are becoming more proactive and strategic than ever before. Our role is to help them get there,” Jorris says. But when everyone looks to technology and AI, he points out, the real question is who controls it. “When every employee uses their own assistant in their own way, the individual gets better, but the firm doesn’t.”
Ravical sits on top of a firm’s existing systems and turns how its best people work into a shared way of working that AI carries out across every client, so every adviser, not just the senior partners, can offer high-value advisory work.
This makes its ambitions very similar to Chift’s, which connects software companies to more than 120 financial systems, including accounting platforms. As Chift CEO Gauthier Henroz told Manda.be: “In order to use AI for accounting, you have to connect it to your finances”.
Read also: Chift's evolution from "not very VC-able" to navigating 70 negotiations
Perhaps fate had been too eager back in 2021…
Going global
Today (2026), more than 100 firms across Europe already agree, including Titeca, ACS and V&M. “Senior review used to be limited by how many files one person could get through. With Ravical, every file gets the same level of review, whichever office it sits in,” says Titeca CEO Jurka Vanthournout in a product review, which ACS partner Bert Clymans and V&M partner Kjell Nauwelaerts echo.
Ravical will use the funding to expand its team, including software engineers in Ghent, and to develop its product. It also plans to strengthen its position in the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, while rolling out across the rest of Europe and entering the United States.
“What a ride so far,” Benjamin reflects. “Thank you to our users for every piece of feedback, including the blunt ones. Thank you to the team for shipping at a pace that keeps surprising me. And thank you to our investors for backing us early.”
