Irish AI startup Numra has announced the launch of its finance assistance Mary, with EUR 1.5 million backing to optimise finance operations and services. Following this announcement, the investment was led by Elkstone, an Irish VC company, with several other contributions from notable angel investors.

The team developed an AI-powered accounts assistant named Mary, which was designed in order to behave just like a real-life team member. Finance companies will have the possibility to train Mary on their processes, as well as give her access to their system and interact with her over email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, or other chat software. Mary focuses on repetitive tasks such as processing invoices, managing collections, as well as performing reconciliations.

More information on the announcement Numra targets firms and companies with large in-house finance teams that process a high volume of transactions, including those in the manufacturing and professional services industries. As several finance teams around the world are burdened by manual, time-consuming tasks and challenges, such as data entry, error investigations, and reconciliations, the inefficiencies end up incurring significant costs to businesses through wasted time and expensive errors, which in the end contribute to poor employee experience. Throughout this launch, Numra will focus on meeting the needs, preferences, and demands of companies and partners in an ever-evolving market, while also prioritising the process of remaining compliant with the regulatory requirements and laws of the industry.

Mary is expected to improve the productivity of finance teams by 30-50%, while also streamlining finance operations by automating tasks. These will include invoice processing, payments, reconciliations, and 3-way matching. At the same time, the product was developed to manage more complex tasks, such as answering vendor queries over email and performing a more detailed and secure cost allocation.

Customers and users will manage Mary through the Numra platform, which will give them the opportunity to carry out tasks like reviews and approvals. The tool’s overall performance will optimise over time as it learns from client feedback and past transactions. In addition, Numra will leverage the new funding in order to accelerate customer acquisition in the region of the US, while also investing further in product development.

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