It’s Tuesday, and today we’re focusing on Integral, a German fintech that recently raised €6.3 million in a round led by General Catalyst and Cherry Ventures, with Puzzle Ventures also participating.
The Product
Integral is a Berlin-based fintech platform offering end-to-end accounting, payroll, and tax advisory services tailored for small and mid-sized businesses in Germany. The premise behind the company’s product is simple: accounting, taxation, and payroll are a mess, and they want to fix it.
For most SMEs, accounting is, as Integral’s founder Lukas Zörner puts it, a black box: a business owner sends something over to their accountant, and then—somehow—things get processed and submitted. There’s little to no communication, which leads to inefficiencies and additional expenses: maybe a financial report has a mistake in it, or a form wasn’t submitted, and now there’s a fine.
Integral offers an all-in-one, “fully managed” digital platform that blends automation with human expertise. Clients get a dedicated accounting team and a certified tax advisor who handle bookkeeping, payroll, financial statements, and tax filings—all in one place.
If you know nothing about accounting but need to get your finances in order, what would you look for?
You don’t understand this stuff—you need it to be easy. You don’t want to enter data manually or juggle 17 different tools to complete one task.
Integral connects with your financial tools (e.g., banking, invoicing software) and uses AI to automate routine tasks.
You want someone you can trust. You know you need a tax advisor or accountant, but you have no clue how to pick a good one.
Integral provides qualified help by partnering with an accounting firm to support its clients. As the platform scales, expect more such partnerships. The company is also hiring its own tax experts.
You have questions, and you want quick answers.. Maybe you still don’t know what amortization is, or you’re struggling with tax exemptions.
Integral offers a knowledge base for instant answers to common questions, and more complex issues get escalated to a human tax advisor who responds via the platform.
You don’t want to miss anything. You don’t track filing deadlines and don’t particularly care. You just want to be left out of the process as much as possible.
Integral monitors tax deadlines and filing progress, alerting clients about due dates or missing information.
And, as many software products do today, Integral is betting on AI, and specifically on agent workflows. We don’t yet know exactly which workflows AI is handling, but we do know it’s supervised—no rogue automation running wild.
The Business Model
Integral explicitly targets smaller companies—specifically, those with 15 employees or fewer. You can tell just by looking at their introductory call page.
In that call, Integral figures out what the client needs and, based on that (and how much work is involved), offers two payment options:
A monthly service fee.
A yearly fee covering all services—bookkeeping, payroll, financial statements, tax advisory.
The more complex the business and the more services the client uses, the bigger the bill.
Once onboarded, everything runs through the platform—clients get access to both the digital tools (dashboards, automation, etc.) and their tax advisor.
The Local Angle
High Compliance Costs: German SMEs spend 1.9% of their revenue on tax compliance. he average German company spends nearly €20,000 on compliance, while the EU average is under €15,000, which still feels high, to be honest. Every type of audit in Germany costs more than the EU average: corporate income tax, VAT compliance, payroll-related costs, property-related compliance—you name it. Over 50% of businesses say that legislation changes too quickly and that administrative procedures are too complex. That percentage is lower than the EU average, which tells you more about EU bureaucracy than anything else.
Lack of Skilled Professionals: Ideally, you’d hire a tax expert to optimize your expenses and make your accounting more efficient. But that would be pretty hard—Germany has a shortage of tax professionals, with 71% of advisory firms reporting hiring challenges. For businesses, staffing is the biggest barrier to digitizing tax processes—35% cite it as a hurdle. Also, tax professionals are getting older: 57% are over 50. Maybe in this case AI replacing jobs isn’t that bad a thing.
A big market to address: The German taxation and accounting market is valued at €45 billion, which provides some context for the opportunity that lies ahead for Integral. But I think what’s more notable is that just 46% of SMEs use any accounting software. Half of the invoices are sent by post. An even bigger point is that adoption of digital technologies in Germany is low. Digital intensity, the EU’s measure of how digitized a business is, is low in German businesses. 47% of German companies don’t pay for a cloud service, just 12% use AI. Only 5% use a vertical SaaS product, compared to 60% in the US, 14% in Singapore, and 8% in France. There’s a lot of room to grow on every front. What helps is that the government is pushing for mandatory digitization. One example: starting this year, all businesses must be able to receive e-invoices.
The Roadblocks
Customer Acquisition Risks: Yes, there are a lot of businesses that have yet to digitize their accounting. But there’s a reason why they haven’t. Maybe they don’t know that they can. Or maybe they have some reservations, or just haven’t gotten around to it. Do German companies know that they lose 2% of revenue on compliance? Do they know how to gauge that figure for their business? Do they care enough, or do they just see it as a cost of doing business?
AI Mistakes: Integral explicitly states that they use AI under an advisor’s guidance: they check AI’s work, they don’t let it run loose. But once AI does the heavy lifting, the temptation to trust it blindly is real. We’re at a point where AI feels reliable enough that people assume it won’t make mistakes, but it’s actually not there yet.
Double Scaling Issue: Integral has to both increase the number of qualified accountants and improve its platform—whether in terms of UX or AI capabilities. With the hiring crunch mentioned earlier, finding quality partners is a challenge. Developing a robust AI for accounting, whether for categorizing transactions or answering tax questions, requires excellent data and training These operational details must be ironed out.
The Takeway
I didn’t imagine how undigitized German businesses are.
It’s amazing how on the one hand, Germany is a leader in industrial innovation (machinery, chemicals, engineering). On the other, its businesses are barely online.
Being so online, you sometimes forget how much room for growth there is. Even in the developed world.
