{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"The Next New Thing","title":"Quanta landed $20 Million for AI Accounting","html":"<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"180\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\" seamless src=\"https://share.transistor.fm/e/9aa68168\"></iframe>","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":2472,"description":"🎧 Highlights:\n[00:00:00] Humans doing the work of AI — before AI existed\n[00:01:12] Why accounting is mostly about language, not numbers\n[00:02:33] Shadowing bookkeepers to find automation opportunities\n[00:06:00] Manual work Quanta knew software had to replace\n[00:07:30] Why building on top of legacy systems wasn’t enough\n[00:08:24] Rebuilding the ledger from the ground up\n[00:10:12] Continuous reconciliation vs. monthly closes\n[00:11:24] From Affirm to founding Quanta\n[00:13:30] Why delayed financials are useless for startups\n[00:16:03] Validating willingness to pay before building\n[00:17:42] Using humans for the “last mile” while automating the rest\n[00:20:15] Solving trust and data-ownership concerns\n[00:22:48] Why most QuickBooks challengers failed\n[00:26:33] Saying no to customers to protect quality\n[00:33:36] Why AI makes real-time margins mandatory\n[00:36:45] Raising $15M Series A ($20M total)\n[00:37:21] Prism: asking your financials questions in plain English\nIn this episode, Andrew Warner interviews Helen Hastings, founder of Quanta, an AI-powered accounting platform built for modern software companies.\nBefore AI could reliably understand financial data, Helen and her team had humans doing what AI does today — reading receipts, interpreting memos, categorizing transactions, and reconciling books by hand. That hands-on approach helped her uncover where automation really mattered, leading to a ground-up rebuild of accounting software that works in near real time.\nHelen shares how Quanta replaces legacy systems by owning the data end-to-end, combining clean ledgers, continuous reconciliation, and AI-powered analysis — and why this approach helped the company raise $15M in Series A funding (over $20M total) and land nearly 100 customers so far.","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/NyHHieTlmHDUHZCr0-GqsmgcxwwW_QdWcFQKUIrpKnI/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9mZGY1/YWFlNGYzMTA0ZWY1/ZmRlNGY0NDIxMjA0/ZDQyYy5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}