Sage has completed the acquisition of Task Sheriff. It is an AI-based Fintech SaaS technology start-up based in Tel Aviv, Israel. Its solution analyses financial documents and converts them into journal entries. Once integrated, it will provide Sage with another step to completing its vision of automating accounting for business. Task Sheriff believes that its solution decreases repetitive work by ten times. It will also reduce mistakes by eight times and increases capacity by more than 600% in organisations. Sage did not disclose the terms of the deal.
The founders of Task Sheriff will join Sage AI Labs (SAIL) according to the press release. Whether that includes all the co-founders is doubtful. Ariel Berger, Gal Nirel, and Gal Lellouche are still listed as working at Task Sheriff and will probably transfer. Ran Veiser, the fourth co-founder, left in 2019 to join Salesforce.
SAIL is a team of AI engineers, product managers, and data scientists based in San Francisco, Melbourne, Barcelona, and Tel Aviv. The solution will no doubt complement Autoentry, a company that delivers document automation and which it bought in 2019.
Sage continues to invest sagely
This is the third investment Sage has made into cloud-based solution vendors in the last few months. In March, it participated in the Seris A funding round of CountingUp. CountingUp provides entrepreneurs with a combined accounting application and bank account. In December, it partnered with and invested £17 million in Brightpearl, a fast-growing company focused on retail operations software.
Aaron Harris, Chief Technology Officer, Sage, said: “As businesses increasingly look to automation and digitalisation, investing in the right technology and talent is core to supporting the success of our customers.
“We’re looking forward to welcoming the Task Sheriff team and bringing the benefits of all our recent investments to our customers as we further extend the capabilities of Sage Business Cloud.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
This acquisition may have been in the Sage sights for a while. Klaus Kaasgaard, Executive Vice President of Experience Design at Sage, has acted as an advisor to Task Sheriff since 2018. Regardless, this is an interesting acquisition that many Sage customers should take note of. The big question is, how quickly can the Sage development teams integrate the software into Sage Business Cloud?
Interestingly, the Task Sheriff solution is aimed not just at SMEs; accounting firms can also reap the automation benefits. One Task Sheriff client Jarvis Accounting Services commented: “We were able to save over 180 hours a month, this allowed us to search and find more customers.”
Derk Bleeker, Chief Corporate Development Officer, Sage, said: “Our goal at Sage is to empower small and medium businesses to benefit from the rapid innovation in AI and other automation technologies to ensure they stay competitive in this fast-moving macro-economic climate. Task Sheriff, Countingup, Brightpearl, and our earlier acquisition of AutoEntry all focus on removing the headaches and friction that our customers face every day so we can help them to grow and thrive.
“We’re tremendously excited to be working with some of the most innovative B2B fintech firms in the world, taking a flexible approach between partnering, investing and acquiring to build our eco-system and bring the benefits of our joint innovation to our customers. We offer these innovators a compelling path to acceleration by leveraging our deep domain and operational expertise, customer base and, where appropriate, capital. We look forward to building on this track record as we continue to increase the pace of innovation for our customers.”
