Sterling, a New Zealand startup that builds software to automate routine finance work, has raised NZ$3.8m (about US$2.2m) in a seed round led by Blackbird, according to a report from IT Brief New Zealand dated 14 August 2026. Startup Daily put the amount at about A$3.15m.
Angel investors from Trade Me, Pushpay, Xero and Vend also joined the round. IT Brief named Rowan Simpson and Eliot Crowther among them. No valuation was disclosed.
Sterling said the money will pay for hiring and for a push toward larger customers in New Zealand, Australia and the United States.
“Finance teams don't want another chatbot to talk to about their work.”Nik Wakelin, Co-founder and CEO, Sterling
What Sterling does
Sterling sells software that lets finance and accounting teams set up AI workflows for jobs such as invoice processing, bank feed reconciliation and month-end routines. It works alongside a company's existing finance systems and inboxes, keeps a log of what it has done, and refers unclear cases to a person.
Chief executive Nik Wakelin set out the pitch in the company's announcement: "Finance teams don't want another chatbot to talk to about their work." He argued that a co-pilot only helps while someone is at the keyboard, whereas Sterling is meant to keep working in the background.
The company's early customers are the internal finance teams at Manukora, Storypark and Echelon, IT Brief reported. Sterling was founded in 2025, according to Startup Daily, and its development was supported by a government research and development grant, the amount of which was not given.
The founders
Wakelin is the chief executive and co-founder. He previously co-founded the time-tracking product MinuteDock and the developer-documentation startup Gelato.io, and later held a senior engineering role at Deliveroo.
The other co-founder, Ludwig Wendzich, spent almost a decade leading product and design at the point-of-sale software company Vend, and stayed on at Lightspeed after it bought Vend. He earlier worked as a senior front-end engineer at Apple.
Wendzich said that almost everyone at Sterling, including its investors, had learned their trade at companies such as Vend and Xero. The company has teams in Wellington and Auckland.
Who invested
James Palmer, a principal at the firm, said in the announcement that the first time Blackbird saw Sterling clear a tedious month-end workload, it was obvious that the product worked.
The angel group is made up of people who built or ran New Zealand software companies. Besides Simpson and Crowther, IT Brief said investors included other alumni of Trade Me, Pushpay, Xero and Vend. The sources do not give the size of each cheque or any earlier funding.
Finance teams and AI
Sterling is entering a crowded field in which many finance teams are trying out AI tools. Wakelin said every finance team is experimenting with AI right now, but that a co-pilot only works while its user is at the keyboard.
Sterling's approach is to run tasks on its own and escalate only the exceptions. Whether customers will trust software to close out routine month-end work without supervision is the question the company now has to answer at larger clients, which it plans to pursue in three countries with the new funding.
Company website: histerling.com