London fintech Round secures $6M in seed funding to manage payroll.

      The London fintech, utilized by Cleo and PostHog, has secured a $6 million seed round led by Alstin Capital, with Backed VC and Love Ventures as contributors. An angel investor, Paul Forster, co-founder of Indeed, also participated in the round. Passion Capital, an early investor in Monzo, Tide, and GoCardless, increased its stake.

      Round, which automates treasury management, payments, payroll, and FX for finance teams at rapidly expanding companies, closed this funding round successfully. Approximately 10% of Round's current customers also took part in the investment alongside new angel investors, including Forster.

      Founded by Pac O’Shea and Hayyaan Ahmad, Round integrates with a company's existing banks, ERP systems, and payment infrastructures, automating cash flow management instead of requiring finance teams to carry out each step individually. Finance teams can establish parameters, approval limits, payment schedules, and minimum cash reserves, while Round manages the execution: payments are sent out, idle cash generates yields in treasury accounts, and payroll is funded and processed. Notable clients include Cleo, an AI money management app, and PostHog, a product analytics platform.

      This new funding aligns with the launch of two new products. The first is the Agentic Workflow Builder, which allows finance teams to specify the workflows they wish to automate in simple language; Round then creates it for approval, and once authorized, the workflow runs perpetually with alerts sent via Slack, WhatsApp, or email only when key decisions are needed.

      The second product is Autonomous Payroll, which enables Round to retrieve payslips from the existing payroll provider, manage approvals with the appropriate personnel, fund the process from treasury, execute the payment, and confirm its completion, streamlining what is often a cumbersome multi-system approach to payroll.

      O’Shea made a deliberate comparison of the company’s strategy to software tools: “Cursor didn’t grow by replacing the CTO. It grew by handling the tasks engineers preferred not to do. We’re taking a similar route, but focused on finance.” This refers to Cursor's AI coding assistant, which automates the repetitive elements of software development without taking the engineer out of the decision-making process.

      Andreas Schenk, a partner at Alstin Capital, remarked that Round is “situated between banks, ERPs, and payment rails, orchestrating cash flows in real-time,” representing a fundamentally innovative approach to financial operations instead of merely improving existing processes.