Keeping the books straight is a business headache. As companies turn to AI to automate routine financial tasks, they face a new worry: whether they can trust bots with company money. Fragment, a New York-based startup, is developing software designed to reduce costly accounting errors.
Founded by serial entrepreneur and CEO Thomas Neckel and CTO Varun Mohan, a former Robinhood engineer, Fragment announced on Wednesday that it raised a $12 million Series A round that closed in mid-2025 to build software that lets AI agents safely handle billing and accounting. Early-stage venture capital firms FirstMark and BoxGroup co-led the financing. The round follows an $11 million seed round led by payments company Stripe, with participation from BoxGroup and tech executives including Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and Plaid CEO Zach Perret. Neckel declined to disclose the company’s valuation following the Series A.
It works like this: Developers plug Fragment’s tools into their software. The system uses double-entry accounting, a centuries-old method that records where money comes from and where it goes, to check that the numbers balance before money moves.
“Just like Claude Code or Cursor is a set of software blocks for agents to automate coding, we are a set of financial building blocks or financial primitives to automate commerce,” Neckel told Fortune.
Fragment’s push is part of a broader shift toward agentic commerce, in which AI agents shop and make payments on users’ behalf. In June, Visa announced a partnership with OpenAI to let agents make purchases within spending limits set by users, while Mastercard introduced a service that lets AI agents more easily pay each other. Three months earlier, Stripe and Tempo launched a shared standard that lets agents pay to access online tools and data without a person completing checkout.
But giving AI agents more control can also expose businesses to costly mistakes. In July 2025, an AI agent from software development platform Replit reportedly deleted a live database despite instructions not to make changes. Concerns about whether humans can trust AI also surfaced after OpenAI said that its experimental agents had bypassed restrictions during tests in July 2026 and accessed systems at Hugging Face, a platform where developers share AI models and training data.
Fragment says its accounting tools can give businesses the confidence to expand AI commerce. It has roughly 50 to 60 paying customers, including corporate card startup Ramp, financial software company BILL, and digital marketplace Whop. They use its software as a shared transaction record, reducing the need for staff to manually check that numbers match across different financial systems.
“We think that this ecosystem is about to explode, and so that’s really the goal: becoming the standard toolkit that anybody uses for bringing financial capabilities to their agents,” said Adam Nelson, a managing partner at FirstMark, who co-led the Series A round.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
