Grasp, the AI startup out Sweden automating investment banking and management consulting work using multi-agent systems, today announces it has raised €6 million in Series A funding.
The round was led by Octopus Ventures, with participation from existing investor Yanno Capital. Grasp is also announcing the opening of its first international office in London. This brings total funding to €7.7 million.
“At McKinsey, we spent over 90% of our time on manual work – reading reports, building excel models, creating presentations,” said Richard Karlsson, CEO and co-founder of Grasp. “Together with Simon, who brought critical AI expertise from Ericsson, we realised AI had the potential to completely transform this $1.4 trillion market of human-intensive finance work. Five years later, we’re proving this thesis.”
Several comparable rounds reflect investor confidence in platforms using AI to streamline complex, knowledge-intensive work.
In Denmark, Light secured €25 million to scale its AI-native finance system that replaces legacy enterprise software. In France, Finary raised €25 million to expand its AI-powered wealth-management tools across Europe. Meanwhile, London-based Saturn collected €12.9 million to automate compliance and administrative tasks in financial advisory work.
Notably, Sweden’s own EvoluteIQ secured €44 million to advance its agentic-AI enterprise platform for sectors including banking and financial services.
Together, these rounds illustrate sustained investor appetite for enterprise-AI startups targeting high-value business processes. Grasp’s funding sits within this broader context – a growing European ecosystem applying multi-agent and automation technologies to reshape finance and consulting workflows, with Sweden emerging as a notable hub for such innovation.
“While AI initially boomed in text-centric fields like law, recent advances have finally enabled AI agents to tackle complex, multimodal tasks prevalent in finance. Now, with Octopus Ventures joining our journey, we’re excited to continue expanding our rapidly growing customer base,” added Karlsson.
Founded in 2020 by two former McKinsey consultants and an Ericsson AI engineer, Grasp is automating complex finance work through multi-agent AI systems. The company serves investment banks, management consultants, private equity firms, and corporate strategy teams across 30 countries. The company currently employs 25 people in Stockholm and London.
Grasp was founded by former McKinsey consultants Richard Karlsson and Johan Devér, together with former Ericsson AI engineer Simon Hällqvist. Combining their industry insights and technical expertise, Richard, Johan, and Simon developed a multi-agent AI system capable of executing complex tasks exactly as humans would – delivering ready-to-present spreadsheets and powerpoint presentations tailored for investment banks, management consultants, and private equity firms.
Posting 3.5x ARR growth over the past 12 months, Grasp serves almost 200 customers , including most of the Big Four consulting firms. The latest funding will be deployed to fuel Grasp’s expansion plans and grow its product and sales teams.
The platform connects highly domain-specific AI systems to trusted tools and datasets, helping teams produce higher-quality output by uncovering more relevant companies, surfacing deeper insights, and reducing time spent on manual, repetitive tasks.
“Grasp is at the forefront of vertical AI in finance, having built a multi-agent system that delivers the kind of high-quality output finance professionals rely on,” said Rich Bolton, Principal at Octopus Ventures. “Their strong traction – more than tripling annually and winning major global customers – demonstrates both the power of their technology and the urgency of the need. We’re thrilled to support a team with such deep domain expertise and a clear vision for transforming how financial work gets done.”
EU-Startups previously covered Grasp in May 2024, when we reported on the company’s €1.7 million Seed round to expand its AI assistant for the finance industry – highlighting its early traction in automating analytical and reporting workflows.
“We continue to have a strong conviction in the mission of Grasp, to automate 90% of the knowledge work done by financial analysts, and we are thrilled to continue to back the strong founder team”, says Anna Storåkers, Partner at Yanno Capital.
