Exclusive: Frst, Seedcamp, GFC back Opio with €4M to automate financial due diligence

Paris startup Opio has closed its first funding round with €4 million from Frst, Seedcamp and Global Founders Capital. The company is building AI that handles financial due diligence, the dull but crucial work auditors do before a company is bought or sold.

That work has long been a manual grind. Junior auditors can spend weeks digging through records by hand, and the reports they produce help decide the terms of a deal. Opio says its software collects, checks and arranges financial data automatically, and that it already gives transaction services professionals back 27% of their time.

The timing is not random. Bpifrance expects 370,000 French companies to change ownership by 2030, including 58,000 small and medium-sized enterprises and 1,200 mid-sized companies. Around three million jobs are tied up in those transitions, which gives Opio a fairly obvious problem to attack: too much paperwork, not enough people.

Co-founder Tristan Fulchiron and general manager Olivier Chancé are both engineers. Fulchiron spent 10 years as a civil servant, leading tech projects for France’s Ministry of Defense and Ministry of the Interior, including the system that let citizens file police complaints online for the first time. He says the pushback he sees in audit feels familiar: people worry the job is being replaced, when the real change is usually that the job gets moved around.

Opio is already working with Forvis Mazars Group and BDO, and its product is used by transaction services teams in 15 countries, including Germany, Canada, Senegal and Hong Kong. The company says 15% of its revenue comes from outside France today, and it wants that to reach 50% within a year. The new money will go into hiring engineers and growing sales in the UK, Germany and possibly Spain, with the US next on the list. It also wants to add statutory audit, the regular certification of company accounts.