Today, our portfolio company Rise officially launched its AI-first financial platform at the Nordic Fintech Summit 2026 in Helsinki.

We are thrilled to announce that Superhero Capital has led a €1.4 million seed round for Rise Financial Group, with participation from prominent Finnish and European fintech angel investors. Founded by serial entrepreneur and angel investor Lennu Keinänen, Rise is building Europe’s first financial service for SMEs where AI automates accounting and certified accountants verify the work in real time.

When we first partnered with co-founders Lennu Keinänen and the team, we shared their vision that SME accounting is fundamentally broken. For too long, small businesses have been forced to manually stitch together separate banks, software tools, and traditional accounting firms. Rise fixes this by introducing a “Service as a Software” model—combining autonomous AI bookkeeping with real-time oversight from licensed professionals.

Below, Rise Co-founder and Group CEO Lennu Keinänen shares the vision behind the launch and why Finland is the perfect launchpad for this European financial revolution.

From Lennu Keinänen, Co-founder & Group CEO of Rise:

“Today, at 09:00 EEST, the Rise team officially launched at the Nordic Fintech Summit 2026 in Helsinki. We’ve spent over a year building this, and I want to tell you what Rise is — and what it is not.”

SME accounting is broken because of two opposing incentives

A 5–50 person company buys at least three separate services to run its finances: an accounting tool, a bank, and an external accountant. Information doesn’t flow between them, so the founder moves it manually. The cash picture is still two weeks late.

The fragmentation is structural, not technical. Software vendors want to automate — it lowers their costs. Accounting firms bill by the hour, so automation eats directly into their revenue. These two sides have pulled in opposite directions for 20 years. The SME pays for both, and gets half the value that combining AI and licensed accounting expertise could actually deliver.

Rise: AI first, mobile second, accountant third

Rise is built in three layers, and the order matters:

• AI first: Because most SME bookkeeping work is repetitive. Machines do that work more reliably than humans, and Rise is built on this assumption from the ground up.

• Mobile second: Because the entrepreneur isn’t sitting at a desk. Finance happens where the entrepreneur is.

• Accountant third: Because a machine cannot have the last word on the year-end accounts. A KLT-licensed team reviews entries before they are finalized.

The entrepreneur gets finished accounting from Rise, not a tool to make it themselves. This model is now starting to be called Service as a Software: the software does the work, the customer gets the result.

Finland is Europe’s frontrunner in fully digital accounting and AI

We’re launching in Finland because it is the most mature market in Europe for AI-driven financial management. According to the Finnish Federation of Financial Management’s spring 2025 survey, 86% of Finnish accounting professionals view AI adoption positively, and 84% expect significant time savings. In the Nordic comparison, Finland leads clearly: 61% of Finnish organizations have already deployed AI, against 52% in Norway and 45% in Sweden. According to Statistics Finland, 38% of Finnish companies were using AI technologies by autumn 2025, up 14 percentage points year-on-year.

Electronic accounting, e-invoicing, and cloud-based finance tools have been part of Finnish SMEs’ lives longer than anywhere else in the EU. This is a market waiting for the right tool, not one that needs convincing.

The vision is European. Over 24 million SMEs across the EU are dealing with the same fragmentation. We start in Finland because Finland is ready first.

A dozen Finnish SMEs are already using Rise

Rise has been in pilot through spring 2026, and about a dozen Finnish 5–50 person companies are using it today.

Book a demo

If you run a Finnish SME — founder, CFO, or operations lead at a 5–50 person company — and the above sounds like what you’ve been waiting for: book 20 minutes with me directly.

I’m personally taking every demo for the first six weeks, because I want to hear from the first wave of customers what’s working and what isn’t. We’ve spent a year building this. It takes you 20 minutes.”

👉 Book a demo on Lennu’s calendar

Lennu Keinänen is Co-founder and Group CEO of Rise Financial Group. He is the founder of Paytrail, a serial entrepreneur, and an angel investor in technology companies.