- In its first funding round, Opio raised €4 million to support the automation of financial due diligence.
- The artificial intelligence enables auditors to reduce the time they spend on transaction services by 27%.
- Bpifrance forecasts that 370,000 French companies will change their ownership by 2030.
Traditionally, junior auditors take several weeks to go through the financial records by hand when a company is acquired. The Paris-based startup Opio, which has a team of 10 people, raised €4 million in its first funding round from Frst, Seedcamp, and Global Founders Capital to automate this task.
The technology used by the startup automatically collects, verifies, and organizes the company’s financial data, eliminating a process that normally takes weeks and is mostly done by hand. Opio states that its technology currently frees up 27% of transaction services professionals’ time.
“Lawyers, consultants and developers have all been through their own AI revolution – it’s now time for auditors carrying out financial due diligence to have theirs,” says Tristan Fulchiron, co-founder of Opio, in a statement to Tech Funding News.
Financial due diligence involves examining a company’s accounts prior to an acquisition, whether conducted by the buyer or the seller. Specialised transaction services teams employed by audit and advisory firms carry out this task, and the reports they produce are used to determine the terms of the deal. Investors, executives, and banks depend on these findings when making major financial decisions.
From filing police complaints to auditing M&A deals
Fulchiron and his co-founder, Olivier Chancé, are both engineers by training. Chancé, who obtained his degree from École Centrale Paris, has been appointed general manager.
Prior to founding Opio, Fulchiron had worked as a civil servant for 10 years, during which time he led various technology projects for France’s Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of the Interior to modernise digital public services.
One of his projects enabled French citizens to file police complaints online for the first time. “It saved a great deal of time for both citizens and policemen,” he tells TFN.
He notes that the resistance he has observed in public service is similar to what he sees among auditors today. He draws a parallel to police officers who have had similar concerns: “You have to help people understand how their job will be transferred, not replaced.”
A niche with only two real rivals
The company Opio has formed partnerships with two of the largest firms in the industry, Forvis Mazars Group and BDO. Its product is currently used by transaction services teams in 15 countries, including Germany, Canada, Senegal, and Hong Kong, each with its own accounting standards.
“It is not typical for a company such as ours to expand on such a scale,” Fulchiron says.
He adds that there is no direct competitor to Opio of its scale in the field of transaction services, although he does identify two companies that are close rivals. In the UK, Tracelight raised $3.6 million in seed funding in 2025 in order to develop AI tools for financial modelling in Excel.
“The company is mainly aimed at strategic advisory firms, working with McKinsey rather than Deloitte,” Fulchiron says. In the Netherlands, DataSnipper, the audit-automation company which achieved a valuation of $1 billion through its Excel-based auditing tools, is “currently incorporating generative AI into their products, so we might become a competitor there at some point too.”
Riding on Europe’s succession wave
This timing corresponds to a demographic problem which France is now beginning to tackle. Bpifrance estimates that by 2030, 370,000 French businesses, including 58,000 small and medium-sized enterprises and 1,200 mid-sized companies, will see their ownership change as owners retire; around three million jobs are associated with these transitions.
“Financial due diligence is a natural fit for AI, but only if every output is accurate and auditable. Opio has built for that reality from day one, giving transaction services teams reconciled, source-linked analysis they can trust. Tristan and Olivier are exceptional founders who have assembled an outstanding early team around them, and their traction with some of the industry’s leading firms speaks for itself,” says Sia Houchangnia, partner at Seedcamp.
Pierre Entremont, partner at Frst, added: “Opio is a rising star of European tech and evidence that it is not just the US that builds innovative and transformational AI companies.”
Other investors in Opio include representatives from KKR in the UK, Deutsche Bank in Germany, and HSBC in France, as well as Arthur Waller, co-founder and chief executive of Pennylane, and Stanislas Polu, co-founder of the AI assistant startup Dust.
At the moment, the company earns 15% of its revenue from outside France and aims to increase this figure to 50% within the next year. The new funds will be used to hire additional engineers and to expand its sales teams in the UK, Germany, and possibly in Spain. This move will prepare the company to enter the US market. Opio also intends to broaden its product offering to include statutory audit, which involves regularly certifying company accounts.
As Fulchiron points out, AI is still in its early stages in the audit sector, since it wasn’t as reliable when dealing with figures as it was with other kinds of tasks. However, over the next five years, AI will completely transform how this industry operates.
“Our aim is to act as the link between generalist AI and Opio. We are confident that we have the potential to become a European leader, particularly compared with companies based in the United States,” Fulchiron concludes.
