Almost every founder reaches a point where the company is growing quickly. Revenue rises, new customers arrive, and teams expand. Everything looks exciting from the outside, that is, until financial issues start to surface.

Receipts pile up in folders, expenses get lost in spreadsheets, and audits approach. Accounting turns into a messy mix of disconnected tools, manual steps, and people struggling to match numbers across systems that don’t work well together.

Anton Rummel and Ante Spittler, two of Moss’s Co-Founders, faced this challenge at their last company back in 2017. Now, they are building the solution they once needed. Read on to see where accounting is going and how Moss aims to help European SMEs get rid of manual accounting for good.

About Moss

Moss is redefining financial management for modern businesses. Built on the belief that finance teams are among the most important growth drivers within any company, Moss helps eliminate the manual, fragmented processes that often hold them back. Its an end-to-end platform that combines cost management incl. corporate cards, accounts payable, approvals and accounting integrations, enabling finance teams to automate routine tasks, gain real-time visibility and operate with greater control. On top of that, Moss leverages AI to streamline workflows and reduce administrative burden. Ultimately, Moss gives finance teams the freedom to focus on what matters most: driving strategic value and supporting business growth.

Modern software wasn’t fixing the problem

“While working at our previous company, we realized we were going to run into an audit, and finance was a huge pain,” recalls Ante Spittler. “Literally, we had tens of folders, probably 40, 50, or 60 folders full of printed receipts randomly sorted.”

At the time, Ante and Anton were running a fast-growing marketplace business that reached over €20 million in revenue by its second year. But as the company grew, its financial systems fell behind.What frustrated them most wasn’t just the inefficiency. They realized that even modern software wasn’t solving the real problem.

“We got a lot of the core data for accounting out of Salesforce. And we thought: why do we have an accounting software if it cannot help us reconcile? Why is Salesforce better at understanding the business than finance software itself?” says Anton Rummel.

That question became the foundation for Moss.

“We had a team of four or five people trying to get a grip, and they couldn’t. We had to bring in a fractional CFO, additional external accountants, and clean up the mess. We wanted to fix this.” - Ante Spittler

Connecting systems

Moss was founded on a simple idea: finance teams shouldn’t spend their days buried in paperwork, chasing receipts, or manually matching transactions across disconnected systems.

Instead, Moss wants to create what the founders call “a step change to finance as it is run today.” The platform brings together corporate cards, accounts payable, reimbursements, procurement workflows, and AI-powered accounting automation into a single system for Europe’s SMEs.

The vision is ambitious but practical: help teams buy what they need when they need it, expense with “zero friction,” and give finance leaders a real-time, digital view of company spending.

Moss is also investing in smart automation. By using AI to handle repetitive accounting tasks, the company hopes to free finance teams from hours of manual work, allowing them to focus on more strategic tasks such as forecasting, planning, team management, and business growth.

Today, Moss is one of Europe’s top end-to-end cost management platforms, serving thousands of businesses in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, the UK, and Ireland.

“The endpoint was always much bigger. We knew from day one we wanted to build a complete finance and accounting suite.” - Ante Spittler

Why finance software has been broken for so long

The Moss story connects with finance leaders because these challenges are so common.

Almost every growing company faces the same problems: too many tools, disconnected systems, endless approvals, and finance teams spending more time on processes than on insights.

For years, these issues were just seen as part of doing business. Expense reports were tedious, procurement approvals were slow, the month-end close was stressful, and audits were tough.

“People accepted it because there wasn’t really a better alternative,” says Ante. Particularly across Europe, many finance systems evolved in fragmented ways. Businesses often relied on combinations of banks, accounting software, spreadsheets, reimbursement tools, ERP systems, procurement platforms, and manual processes patched together over the years. The result was operational complexity hidden underneath otherwise modern businesses.

“It was mind-blowing to see how many companies still rely on pen and paper or Excel,” says Anton. A finance team might have visibility into invoices but not card spend. Procurement teams might operate separately from accounting. Controllers might struggle to access real-time data. But Moss wants to reverse that dynamic entirely.

Instead of making employees follow rigid finance workflows, Moss automates the complex parts in the background. Receipts are captured instantly, transactions are automatically sorted, approvals happen online, and finance teams get real-time visibility without manual data entry.

“We want teams on the ground to move faster. Buying what they need when they need it, then expensing it with zero friction,” - Ante Spittler

Building a live operational layer

In the past, finance teams often worked with outdated information. Reports came weeks late, spending visibility lagged, and decisions were made with incomplete data.

For Moss, the future of finance isn’t just about faster bookkeeping. It’s about building a continuous finance infrastructure.

Imagine books that close in real time, with spending controls built into workflows, automated anomaly detection, and smart forecasting. This shift might seem small from the outside, but it changes how companies work on the inside.

If finance teams don’t have to spend weeks cleaning data, they can focus on analyzing business performance. When approvals happen automatically, employees move faster. With up-to-date spending visibility, leaders can make confident decisions rather than relying on outdated reports.

Moss believes finance should work less like a traditional reporting department and more like a live intelligence layer that runs throughout the company.

“One of the most important things for finance leaders is having a real-time picture of financial truth.” - Anton Rummel

Building finance infrastructure for the AI era

Before generative AI became a big topic in software, Moss had already spent years building structured financial infrastructure and data. This matters because AI is only as useful as the context it works with.

In finance, context is key. An invoice doesn’t mean much unless the system knows the supplier’s history, payment timing, approval rules, spending patterns, accounting categories, past behavior, and any unusual activity. Many companies struggle with this.

It is relatively easy to make an impressive AI demo. Building a system reliable enough for real financial operations is much harder.

“The power of AI only becomes visible when you have context,” - Ante Spittler

Trust above everything else

Trust changes how finance software must be built.

Unlike social apps or lightweight productivity tools, finance software operates inside highly sensitive environments. Errors can create legal consequences. Incorrect accounting can damage businesses. Broken workflows can disrupt entire organizations.

For Moss, reliability is just as important as innovation. The company invested in integrations, accounting layers, and workflow infrastructure long before AI became popular. Now, as generative AI changes software, Moss already has years of structured transaction data and finance workflows.

This gives Moss a big advantage. The founders say the real opportunity isn’t just adding AI chat features to finance products, but embedding intelligence directly into operational systems.

This could mean automatically sorting transactions with high accuracy, spotting unusual spending right away, predicting approval delays before they happen, suggesting accounting treatments, or even automating many financial operations.

The founders now see Moss less as a spend management tool and more as a finance operating system. This view shapes how they set product priorities inside the company.

“You need trust, especially when customers are running critical finance operations through Moss systems,” - Anton Rummel

Making things more manageable for finance teams

A key theme in the Moss story is how often the founders talk about operational overload.

Today’s finance teams do much more than bookkeeping. They manage procurement, oversee compliance, coordinate audits, help with forecasting, track budgets, monitor cash flow, handle reimbursements, review contracts, and offer strategic advice across the company.

Yet many teams still use manual systems. Spreadsheets are everywhere, approvals happen over email, receipts get lost, and teams enter data more than once across platforms. Moss says this leads to a lot of wasted mental effort.

This admin burden gets worse during rapid growth. As companies scale, there are more transactions, more approvals, more invoices, and there is more reconciliation work.

Without strong systems, financial complexity grows fast. The Moss founders saw this firsthand; their last company grew quickly, but its financial systems couldn’t keep up the pace.

How fast can employees buy what they need? How easy are approvals? How much manual work can be cut? How quickly can finance leaders see company spending?

These questions now shape the product roadmap. The founders say AI speeds up this shift in a big way.

“Finance teams spend too much time on admin.” -  Anton Rummel

Inside the Moss operating culture

Moss’s intense operations reflect its big ambitions. The founders see building the company less as a startup experiment and more as creating a long-term performance system.

This mindset shapes how Moss hires, sets priorities, and gets things done. Anton often stresses the value of short cycles, while not forgetting the long-term vision, direct communication, and clear priorities.

“Time is probably the biggest currency you have,” he says. At Moss, this means staying focused on execution. The founders are closely involved in hiring, and product teams spend a lot of time with customers.

AI projects at Moss move quickly from testing to real use. Unlike many fast-growing companies that expand product lines too soon, Moss has focused on building a strong infrastructure first.

Finance products are hard to replace once they’re built into company workflows. Reliability, accuracy, and integrations all matter. This focus on discipline shapes Moss’s culture, too.

The founders stress ownership and autonomy. Employees are expected to move fast, communicate clearly, and take responsibility.

This approach reflects a broader culture at Moss. Even though it’s in a very competitive software space, Moss talks about execution in calm, process-focused terms instead of hyping things up.

The founders know that building financial infrastructure takes time. Trust, integrations, and customer relationships all grow slowly. Because finance systems are so central to operations, product quality is crucial.

“There’s no way this works unless you’re obsessed with it,”- Ante Spittler

Why Europe is the perfect market for Moss

The founders also see Europe as a great opportunity for finance automation.

Unlike in the US, where software systems are often consolidated early, Europe’s finance infrastructure developed in a much more fragmented way.

Each country has its own accounting standards, banking systems, compliance rules, tax structures, and procurement processes. This fragmentation made things complex for growing businesses, but it also created new opportunities.

Moss now positions itself as a platform capable of handling this complexity across Europe. The company already operates in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, the UK, and Ireland. The founders say many finance teams in Europe are still underserved.

This insight shapes Moss’s growth strategy. Instead of just targeting big companies, Moss focuses on SMEs and mid-sized firms, where financial complexity is rising but tools are often outdated.

These businesses may not have large engineering teams or dedicated finance transformation departments, but they still face the same challenges. In fact, they may feel the inefficiencies even more.

A growing startup can’t afford finance bottlenecks. A scaling business can’t spend weeks closing books by hand. A small finance team can’t waste hours chasing receipts in emails. This urgency makes platforms like Moss more valuable.

“It was mind-blowing to see how many companies still rely on pen and paper or Excel,” - Anton Rummel

The future of AI inside finance

The Moss founders don’t see AI as magic. They see it as a tool to remove repetitive work, improve speed and visibility, and help finance teams focus on more strategic and value-driving work.

Most AI discussions today focus on chat interfaces, copilots, and automation demos. Moss believes the real opportunity is in redesigning financial operations themselves.

What if approvals become mostly automatic? What if invoices are processed on their own? What if accounting reconciliation happens in the background? What if financial forecasts were updated in real time? These questions now shape Moss’s long-term vision.

The founders believe finance teams will soon spend much less time on repetitive admin and much more time on planning, strategy, and decision-making.

This shift could change the finance profession. Controllers become operators, finance managers become strategists, and accounting turns into an automated system running quietly in the background.

And the implications extend far beyond bookkeeping.

With real-time financial visibility, businesses can move faster. Smoother procurement workflows help teams act quickly. Better anomaly detection means stronger risk management.

Finance becomes proactive instead of reactive. Moss believes this could be the biggest change in the next decade.

“Imagine intelligent automation that lets finance teams close books in real-time and swap hours of admin for elevated work.” - Anton Rummel

Quickfire Round

A tool you can’t live without

Ante Spittler: “Projects in Claude. The power of AI is incredible if it has the right context and strategic guidance.”

Recharge ritual

Anton Rummel: “My daily sports routine. Every morning at 7 am.”

Advice that stuck

Ante Spittler: “When you think you have a big market, it’s still ninety percent too small.”

Anton Rummel: “Sell during the day, build in the evening.”

A founder you admire

Anton Rummel: “Frank Slootman from Snowflake. Pragmatic, bold, KPI-driven, no bullshit.”

The next chapter

Moss will continue expanding its AI-powered finance capabilities throughout 2026, including deeper automation across accounting, procurement, and financial oversight workflows.

The founders now think the traditional finance stack could disappear, along with disconnected tools, manual reconciliation, spreadsheet-heavy workflows, and delayed reporting.

Many of these old ways may soon become obsolete.

If Moss succeeds, finance departments could look very different from the back-office setups companies have used for the past twenty years. Moss is betting that those who modernize their financial systems fastest will gain a real competitive edge.

Because in a world increasingly shaped by AI, operational speed compounds. And according to Anton, finance should no longer be the thing slowing companies down. Check out their product and schedule a demo.