Light

What Is Light?

The conventional wisdom in finance software says you should never trust your general ledger to a young vendor. NetSuite has been running since 1998. SAP predates most of its customers' founders. Even Pennylane and sevDesk, the newer EU accounting challengers, have several years of production history behind them. Light asks finance teams to set that instinct aside.

Founded in Copenhagen in 2022 by Jonathan Sanders and Filip Kozjak, Light is legally Light Company ApS, a Danish private limited company (CVR 43523503) governed by Danish law with Copenhagen courts holding exclusive jurisdiction. The pitch is that fast-growing, multi-entity companies have outgrown QuickBooks and Xero but don't yet need — or want — the multi-year SAP or NetSuite implementation that traditionally follows. Light positions itself as the AI-native alternative: one ledger, automatic intercompany elimination, and agents that execute finance workflows instead of humans clicking through screens.

The contrarian case for Light is straightforward: legacy ERP vendors were built for a world before large language models existed, and a from-scratch rebuild can genuinely move faster. There is an equally straightforward case against it, though: a company with roughly 90 employees and three years of operating history is being asked to hold your accounts payable, accounts receivable, and consolidated financial reporting. Both things can be true at once, so buyers should weigh them rather than pick whichever version matches their existing bias.

Key Features

Single Ledger, Automatic Intercompany Elimination

Light's core architecture keeps every legal entity's transactions in one ledger rather than separate books that get consolidated at month-end. Intercompany entries eliminate automatically as they post, so a CFO can pull a consolidated report across entities without assembling a spreadsheet first. For companies running three, five, or more legal entities across different currencies, this is the single strongest argument for switching away from a patchwork of QuickBooks instances.

AI Agents for Recurring Workflows

Rather than presenting AI as a chatbot bolted onto existing screens, Light builds agents directly into accounts payable, accounts receivable, and reconciliation workflows. The stated goal is to remove the manual, repetitive work that consumes junior finance headcount at scale-ups. KeyShot, one of Light's earliest customers, reports an 80% reduction in manual accounting work after consolidating its Denmark and US entities on Light. That is a specific, named case study rather than a vague company-wide statistic.

Full-Stack Coverage in One System

Light bundles general ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable, revenue recognition, expenses, corporate cards, and reporting into a single workspace, rather than positioning itself as a bolt-on tool that sits beside NetSuite or SAP. That is an ambitious scope for a three-year-old company to execute well across every module simultaneously, and buyers should test each workflow individually rather than assuming feature parity across the board.

Integrations Built for Global Operations

Light connects to Adyen and Stripe for payments, Avalara for tax, J.P. Morgan for banking, and Salesforce and HubSpot on the revenue side, alongside Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Google Sheets plugins for day-to-day workflow. This is a reasonably serious integration list for a company at Light's stage, though it remains narrower than the decades-deep partner ecosystems around SAP or NetSuite.

Named Customers Beyond KeyShot

Light's public customer list includes Famly, a childcare-management SaaS company, and Omnea, a procurement platform, alongside KeyShot. Finance leaders at both companies are quoted on Light's site describing time saved on manual reconciliation. That is still a short list next to the thousands of reference customers SAP or NetSuite can point to. Buyers should ask for references in their own industry and entity structure before assuming the KeyShot result will generalise to their business.

None of these named customers are large, multinational corporations with decades of legacy-system entrenchment. They are venture-backed, fast-growing companies of a similar profile to Light itself, which is precisely the segment Light says it is targeting. Whether that same product works for a more traditional multinational with a slower-moving finance function is a separate, untested question.

Pricing

Here is where the contrarian argument runs into a wall: Light publishes no pricing whatsoever. Every plan requires booking a demo, and no per-seat rate, implementation fee, or minimum contract value appears anywhere on the public site. Compare that to Holded or Moneybird, which publish clear tiers, or even Pennylane, which at least gives prospective buyers a sense of scale before a sales call.

For a company targeting hypergrowth, multi-entity customers rather than single-entity SMEs, custom pricing based on entity count, transaction volume, and integration scope is not unusual — SAP and NetSuite both operate the same way. The difference is that SAP and NetSuite have decades of public case studies, consultants, and benchmarking data that let a buyer triangulate likely cost before the first call. Light does not yet have that ecosystem, so pricing discovery starts from zero.

EU Compliance & Privacy

Light's compliance position is stronger than its funding stage might suggest. The platform runs on EU-based AWS infrastructure and is SOC 2 Type II certified, covering how client data is processed and stored under AICPA standards. Its own compliance documentation describes a SOC 1 attestation as "on track," which supports future SOX and public-company readiness but is not yet complete.

As a Danish entity, Light falls under GDPR by default, and its stated design goal is data minimisation — moving financial data between systems rather than accumulating and profiling it. That combination of EU hosting, SOC 2 Type II certification, and an in-progress SOC 1 attestation is a genuinely credible starting position for a company this young. It still falls short of the audit history a Datev or SAP customer would expect, though.

Who It's Best For

Fast-growing technology companies with three or more legal entities and outgrown spreadsheets, but not yet ready for a multi-year SAP or NetSuite rollout, are Light's clearest target. If your finance team spends real hours each month reconciling intercompany transactions manually, the automatic elimination alone may justify the switch.

Risk-tolerant finance leaders who are comfortable being an early reference customer, and who have engineering support internally to validate integrations before go-live, will get more value than teams expecting a plug-and-play migration. Companies that need SOX-ready, fully audited financial infrastructure today should wait for Light's SOC 1 attestation to complete before committing core general-ledger workflows to it.

Businesses that need transparent, comparable pricing during evaluation — a common procurement requirement in regulated industries — will find Light's demo-only model frustrating next to Lexoffice or Sevdesk, both of which publish rates upfront.

Single-entity SMEs without cross-border consolidation needs are not really Light's target market at all. A local business running one legal entity in Germany, for instance, is likely better served by a domestic tool like Datev or Holded. Both have mature local support networks that Light has not yet built, and neither requires a demo call just to see a price.

The Verdict

Light makes a credible technical case: one ledger, automatic intercompany elimination, and AI agents built into workflows rather than added as an afterthought. The KeyShot case study is a real, named result rather than marketing filler, and the EU hosting plus SOC 2 Type II certification are more mature than you'd expect from a three-year-old vendor. Those are genuine strengths, not hype.

The contrarian instinct that says "don't put your ledger on an unproven platform" isn't wrong either. It is a reasonable, evidence-based caution given the company's size, its two published G2 reviews, and its still-incomplete SOC 1 attestation. Light is worth evaluating seriously if you fit its multi-entity, high-growth profile and can tolerate being an early adopter, but it is not yet the safe default choice that its ERP-replacement pitch implies.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Light GDPR compliant?

Yes. Light Company ApS is a Danish entity (CVR 43523503) subject to GDPR by default, hosts its platform on EU-based AWS infrastructure, and describes a data-minimisation approach that avoids unnecessary personal-data collection during account syncing.

Does Light publish its pricing?

No. Light does not publish any pricing tiers or per-seat rates. Every plan requires a demo and a custom quote, which makes it harder to budget or compare against competitors like Pennylane or Holded before engaging sales.

How does Light compare to SAP or NetSuite?

Light targets the same multi-entity, high-growth companies that outgrow QuickBooks or Xero and would otherwise implement SAP or NetSuite. Its pitch is a faster, AI-native alternative built for scale-ups; SAP and NetSuite have decades of enterprise deployment history and far larger partner and integrator ecosystems that Light cannot yet match.

How mature is Light as a company?

Light was founded in 2022, has around 90 employees, and has raised $43M across a seed round and a $30M Series A led by Balderton Capital in September 2025. It is a genuinely young vendor with limited independent review history, which is a real consideration for finance teams evaluating long-term risk.

Can Light replace multiple point tools like expense management and AP automation?

Yes, that is its core pitch. Light bundles general ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable, revenue recognition, expenses, and corporate cards into one system, aiming to replace the combination of an ERP plus several bolt-on finance tools with a single AI-native platform.