Dytto Raises €1.5M Pre-Seed Funding to Give Accountants Back One Hour Every Single Day

The accounting profession carries a peculiar and rarely discussed burden. On the surface, accountants are engaged for their financial intelligence — their ability to decode complex tax legislation, manage audits, prepare financial statements, and guide businesses through critical fiscal decisions. But in practice, a substantial chunk of their working day vanishes into administrative tasks that have little to do with the expertise they were hired for. Drafting client emails, assembling document packages, searching through old filings, managing correspondence across disconnected software — these are the tasks that silently eat away at a professional's most productive hours. This is precisely the problem that Belgian startup Dytto has decided to tackle head-on, and it has now closed €1.5 million in pre-seed funding to do exactly that.

This latest AI funding development out of Europe is a significant one. The round was co-led by Entourage Capital and Fortino Ventures, two well-regarded names in the European venture capital landscape. The raise also attracted participation from the founders of Aikido Security and Tally, alongside several accounting firm partners who understand the problem Dytto is solving from direct professional experience. As AI funding news continues to pour out of Europe's growing professional services technology sector, Dytto's raise stands out not for its size but for its precision — a tightly focused solution targeting one of the most overlooked efficiency gaps in a trillion-dollar industry.

The company's mission statement is both bold and deliberately human: "Free the Accountant." The intent is not to replace accounting professionals with artificial intelligence, nor to automate them out of relevance. The goal is far more practical — to give them back their time so they can invest it where it matters most: in their clients, their expertise, and the advisory work that no algorithm can replicate.

The Deep-Rooted Admin Problem Crippling Accounting Firms

To understand why Dytto exists, you have to appreciate the strange paradox that has defined accounting over the past decade. The profession underwent a significant digital transformation. Cloud-based accounting platforms became the norm. Automated bookkeeping tools reduced manual data entry. Smart invoicing systems streamlined billing. By most measures, accounting should feel more efficient today than it did ten years ago. Yet for the professionals working inside these firms, the daily experience tells a different story entirely.

Dytto's founding team didn't arrive at this insight through secondary research or industry reports. They went directly to the source, speaking with more than 100 accountants across Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. What they heard, consistently and without exception, was the same frustration expressed in different words: accountants are still spending enormous portions of their working day on tasks that should either be handled more quickly or delegated entirely. Drafting follow-up emails to clients. Preparing document bundles before consultations. Hunting through archived files to locate past correspondence. Managing the flow of paperwork that surrounds every client engagement.

None of this is complex work. But collectively, it adds up to hours — hours that disappear every single day, hours that could have been used to deepen a client relationship, develop a new advisory offering, or simply handle the growing volume of work that firms are expected to manage. The tools that were digitized in the last wave of transformation were built to store and process data efficiently. They were not built to actively support the human working alongside them. What accountants were missing was not more software — it was a genuinely intelligent assistant who understood their work, their clients, and their daily rhythms.

This problem is not confined to small firms with limited resources. Even large, well-resourced accounting practices across Western Europe face the same structural inefficiency because the issue is not one of budget — it is one of design. No existing accounting platform was architected to take the administrative load off individual professionals. Dytto was built specifically to fill that gap.

What Dytto Does and How It Works Inside Existing Firm Workflows

Dytto operates as an AI assistant built exclusively for accounting professionals. Unlike broad enterprise productivity platforms or general-purpose AI tools that require firms to adapt their workflows to fit the technology, Dytto was engineered from scratch with the specific rhythms and requirements of accounting work in mind. It connects directly to client data, integrates with the tools and software firms already rely on every day, and begins delivering value almost immediately — with no expensive implementation project, no lengthy onboarding cycles, and no vendor lock-in.

The practical mechanics of how Dytto works are elegantly straightforward. The platform sits within the existing technology stack of an accounting firm and provides active, context-aware assistance across the most time-consuming daily tasks. When a professional needs to draft a follow-up email to a client about outstanding documents, Dytto handles the drafting. When a file needs to be prepared ahead of a client consultation, Dytto assembles the relevant materials. When information from past correspondence or historical documents is needed, Dytto locates it quickly. The platform functions like a knowledgeable, always-available assistant that handles the scaffolding around professional work so the accountant can focus on the substance.

Importantly, the entire system is designed around a philosophy of human oversight and professional control. Nothing within Dytto moves forward without explicit approval from the accountant. Every suggestion the platform makes, every document it prepares, every email it drafts — all of it sits in review until the professional signs off. Co-founder and CTO Jorne De Blaere, who previously built AI products at Silverfin, one of Europe's leading accounting software platforms, described this philosophy clearly: "Our AI assists, but humans decide. We designed Dytto so firms can embed their own expertise and ways of working. That is how they stay differentiated."

This human-first design approach is more than a safety feature — it is central to the product's entire value proposition. Concerns about AI operating autonomously on behalf of clients in regulated professional services contexts are well-founded, and firms are rightly cautious about tools that blur the line between assistance and independent action. Dytto sidesteps this concern entirely. The AI does the legwork; the professional always remains the trusted adviser and the final decision-maker.

The early commercial results from firms already using the platform have been concrete and measurable. Clients across Belgium, the Netherlands, and the UK report saving up to one hour per team member, per day. For a ten-person firm, that represents ten recovered hours of capacity every working day — time that can be redirected toward client-facing advisory work, business development, or simply allowing the team to breathe without being perpetually overwhelmed. In a landscape where AI funding news is often built around ambitious projections rather than demonstrated results, Dytto's early traction gives this raise a credibility that many pre-seed rounds simply do not have.

The Founding Story: Built From Real-World Frustration, Not a Whiteboard

Every great startup begins with a founder who couldn't stop thinking about a problem. In Dytto's case, the founding story is grounded in a very human observation that gradually became impossible to ignore. Co-founder and CEO Niels Van Driessche first noticed the problem through his own personal network. Friends who ran businesses were dissatisfied with their accountants — not because their accountants were incompetent or unqualified, but because they simply weren't getting enough attention, communication, or proactive guidance. The relationship felt reactive rather than advisory.

When Niels dug deeper into the root causes of this dissatisfaction, the picture became clear. The accountants weren't the problem. They were buried — drowning in administrative work, perpetually behind on communications, stretched across more client files than any professional could realistically manage well while also juggling daily admin. The relationship wasn't broken. It was starved of time. Niels recognized that AI had matured to a point where this specific problem could finally be addressed properly, and he began building.

The pivotal moment came when Niels connected with Jorne De Blaere. Jorne brought a complementary dimension to the founding team that proved to be critically important. Having spent considerable time building AI-powered products within Silverfin's accounting platform, he had accumulated deep expertise in applying machine learning and language models to real accounting workflows. He had also experienced the frustration of building within the constraints of legacy software infrastructure — the technical ceiling that prevents even good ideas from being executed fully. The moment Niels and Jorne connected, the potential of starting from scratch, with no legacy architecture and no historical constraints, was immediately apparent to both.

This founder-market fit — one co-founder who understood the problem from the client and business side, and another who had built AI solutions for the industry from within its own infrastructure — gave Dytto an unusually solid foundation for a company at the pre-seed stage. It also gave investors precisely the signal they look for. As Pieterjan Bouten, Founder and Managing Partner at Entourage Capital, explained: "Dytto is not chasing AI hype. It is solving a genuine problem for an industry that has been swamped with underperforming technology and disappointed in the promise of AI. Niels and Jorne understand both the accounting world and how to build great products with AI."

The AI funding secured in this round will be deployed across three strategic areas: deepening the product's capabilities and expanding integrations across the full accounting software stack, accelerating European market expansion to bring Dytto to more firms across the continent, and scaling the team across engineering, product management, and customer success to support the growth ahead.

Expanding Across Europe and Building for the Future of the Profession

The timing of Dytto's launch and this funding round is well-aligned with a broader transformation happening across European professional services. Accounting firms, which have historically been among the more conservative adopters of new technology, are now beginning to recognize that standing still in the face of practical, productivity-improving AI tools is no longer a defensible position. Firms that embrace these tools today are building operational advantages that compound over time — handling larger client loads without proportionally expanding headcount, delivering faster turnaround times, and freeing their senior professionals to spend more time on high-value strategic work.

Dytto's current geographic footprint spans Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom — three markets with mature accounting sectors, strong professional services cultures, and meaningful technology adoption. The fresh capital will be used to deepen the company's presence in these markets and extend into new European territories where the structural inefficiency Dytto addresses is equally prevalent. Filip Van Innis, Managing Partner at Fortino Ventures, captured the broader market opportunity precisely when he noted: "Professional services is one of the largest sectors still waiting for AI to deliver real value. Dytto is tackling the adoption challenge by meeting accountants where they work, inside the tools they already use."

This observation reflects one of the most important lessons that has emerged from the current generation of enterprise AI deployments. The tools that gain meaningful adoption are not those that demand users restructure their entire way of working. They are the ones that fit invisibly into existing workflows, reducing friction rather than introducing new complexity. Dytto is built precisely around this principle, and the early retention and daily usage patterns the company reports suggest it is working.

On the team and culture front, Dytto has been transparent about both where they stand and where they want to go. The small founding team currently includes 25% representation from diverse backgrounds. The founders have acknowledged openly that gender diversity is not yet present on the team and have committed to making it an active priority in all future hiring. This kind of candid accountability — naming a gap and committing to address it — reflects the kind of organizational self-awareness that growing companies need if they want to build cultures that are genuinely inclusive and representative.

What Dytto's Rise Signals for AI Funding in Professional Services

The broader significance of Dytto's €1.5 million pre-seed raise extends well beyond the company itself. It is part of a growing pattern in AI funding news where investors are increasingly directing early-stage capital toward precision-engineered, purpose-built AI tools that serve specific professional verticals rather than attempting to compete as general-purpose platforms. The era of generic AI assistants promising to help everyone with everything is giving way to a new generation of focused, deeply integrated tools that know one domain very well and do one job exceptionally.

Accounting is a profession that underpins virtually every business that exists. Every company, regardless of size, industry, or geography, needs financial oversight, compliance management, and fiscal guidance. The professionals who provide these services carry significant responsibility, and when the administrative demands of the job prevent them from delivering the advisory quality their clients genuinely need, the impact ripples through the entire economy. A tool that removes even one hour of that administrative burden per professional per day has the potential to reshape how accounting firms operate at scale.

At the AI World Organisation, we are closely watching the acceleration of AI funding into professional services technology across Europe and globally. What Dytto represents is a compelling proof of concept: that with the right founders, the right domain focus, and the right philosophy of keeping humans firmly in control, AI can be deployed in professional contexts in ways that enhance rather than undermine the expertise and judgment of the professionals it serves. The accountants who are building their practices around tools like Dytto today are not just saving time — they are building the foundations of a more capable, more responsive, and more client-centric profession for the decade ahead.