Mika’s €6 Million Seed Still Needs Germany’s Tax Advisers

Berlin startup mika has raised €6 million to automate bookkeeping and tax filings for German GmbHs and UGs. Smedvig Ventures led the seed, with Basel family office Wecken & Cie. joining through Care4 AG.

Founder Agnieszka Walorska says the product tears down the tax-adviser barrier that greets anyone who incorporates. Two of the three packages on her own site still put a licensed Steuerberater on the annual close.

A Year That Took Mika Past 800 GmbHs

Dealroom listed the company at more than 800 small firms after the round, with annualised revenue past €1 million in summer 2026. About 400 GmbHs and UGs were on the platform at the start of 2026, so the book has at least doubled in nine months.

Existing backers Keen Venture Partners and Dutch Founders Fund added to their holdings. Angel cheques came from studiVZ co-founders Dennis Bemmann and Michael Brehm, limango founder Johannes Ditterich, and Martina Pfeifer of encourageventures. Combined with an €800,000 pre-seed in June 2024, disclosed funding is now €6.8 million.

The company, founded in 2023, built an AI general ledger for German accounts rather than a wrapper around a US or UK book. It reads receipts and payments, picks a model by task, applies German booking rules, and explains the entry. Trained accountants review the output and step in when a case needs a person. Users can also query the books inside mika or through the Model Context Protocol with assistants such as ChatGPT or Claude.

THE SEED IN FOUR FIGURES

• New capital: €6 million seed led by Smedvig Ventures.
• Live book: More than 800 GmbHs and UGs, up from about 400 in early 2026.
• Run-rate: Annualised revenue passed €1 million in summer 2026.
• Entry price: Bookkeeping starts at €49 a month on the public price list.

The first customers were digital-first agencies and consultancies. The mix now includes SaaS, property, e-commerce, retail and skilled trades. Walorska, Lukas Linnekuhle (CFO) and Henry Müssemann (CTO) will put the new money into growth and further work on the platform, including an internal tool referred to in round materials as mika Desk.

FROM PRE-SEED TO SEED

1. 2023: Walorska founds mika in Berlin after earlier stints at studiVZ and a shut family-fintech, PANQ.
2. June 2024: Samen Slimmer, the Keen, Dutch Founders Fund and Slimmer AI alliance, leads an €800,000 pre-seed.
3. Early 2026: About 400 GmbHs and UGs are live on the ledger.
4. Summer 2026: Annualised revenue passes €1 million.
5. September 23, 2026: Smedvig leads a €6 million seed.

That pace is real. It is still a rounding error next to the German corporate register.

€49 a Month Still Ends With a Tax Adviser

mika markets itself as the AI alternative to a tax office, priced from 49 euros a month, GDPR-compliant, on German servers. The public list is not a single replacement product. It is three different relationships with the same profession.

MIKA’S THREE PACKAGES

The cheap plan exists to cut the monthly grind and then pass a tidy ledger to the adviser the founder already has. The mid plan lets a director walk through the Jahresabschluss inside the app. The top plan still names a partner adviser for the close. Individual tax advice is not in the service. mika sends those questions to licensed people in its network.

Company copy says users can save up to 80 percent of accounting time and up to 60 percent of tax-consulting cost, with staff bookkeepers checking work several times a month rather than in a year-end pile. It also claims 95 percent automation and 98 percent accuracy on receipt reads. Those are mika’s figures, not a chamber audit. A year at the published entry price is €588. The €99 plan is €1,188 a year before volume surcharges, which the site says vary with expected receipts and transactions.

Onboarding still assumes a DATEV export from the current adviser. The all-inclusive tier lists DATEV export as a feature. The pipes the profession already uses are not being unplugged. They are being fed from a different front end.

Does a German GmbH Still Need a Tax Adviser?

No statute forces a new GmbH to retain a Steuerberater, which is why some founders treat the habit as if it were law. Paid, case-by-case tax help is still reserved work. Software may keep the books. It may not sit in the adviser’s chair.

Section 2 of the Steuerberatungsgesetz treats help in tax matters as any activity in someone else’s affairs that needs a legal look at the individual case. Unauthorised help in tax matters is banned for anyone outside the licensed circle of tax advisers, lawyers and auditors. Section 6 then carves out the monthly grind: laying out charts of accounts, booking current transactions, running payroll and filing the Lohnsteuer return, if the work sits with people who have a commercial qualification and at least three years of bookkeeping practice at 16 hours a week or more.

That split is the product. mika’s reviewers can legally sit in the § 6 lane. The chatbot that explains a Finanzamt letter, and the promise of one-click declarations, have to stay on the tool side of that line. Walorska has said the aim is a fully autonomous tax tool for one-click compliance and a one-click yearly close. The live catalogue is more cautious than that sentence.

KI ersetzt nicht den menschlichen Steuerberater, sondern unterstützt und beschleunigt dessen Arbeit. Erfahrung und fachliche Expertise bleiben unerlässlich.

Bundessteuerberaterkammer, FAQ on AI in the tax profession, 27 January 2026

The same chamber guidance that AI stays a tool answers its own question about replacement with a flat no, and keeps final judgment with the licensed person. The chamber represents almost 106,000 tax advisers, assistant advisers and advisory firms. It has already shown it will police the protected title when software brands blur it. mika’s site never calls the bot a Steuerberater. That is not courtesy. It is how you stay on the right side of § 5.

The Cooperative That Books 2.8 Million Organisations

The incumbent is not a sleepy desktop vendor. DATEV eG, the Nuremberg cooperative founded in 1966 by 65 tax agents, closed 2025 with 1.65 billion euros in 2025 revenue, more than 40,000 members, more than a million direct customers and about 2.8 million organisations on its software. More than 9,000 staff run the stack. DATEV software produces payslips for more than 14.5 million employees a month and holds about 665,000 specialist texts.

DATEV AND MIKA, SIDE BY SIDE

Sixty years after those 65 agents pooled a bookkeeping computer, the cooperative’s job is still to make its members money, not to make them optional. Members are owners and users. They decide how far clients get to touch the tools. A seed-stage ledger that still asks for a DATEV file on day one is joining that circuit, not leaving it.

IBISWorld puts Germany’s accounting, bookkeeping and auditing industry at €53.8 billion in 2026, across 54,185 businesses, with 0.7 percent growth this year and a 2.1 percent average annual rise since 2021. That pool includes audit giants as well as the high-street Kanzlei. mika is fishing in the small-corporate end of it, where the monthly books are repetitive and the adviser relationship is expensive relative to turnover.

Finanzbuchhaltung Still Funds the Typical Practice

German operators who actually close the books keep making the same point the chamber does. Machine booking speeds the obvious cases. It still misses context, odd contracts and the invoice someone meant to get wrong. mika’s answer is the human loop: Steuerfachangestellte check the file several times a month. That is also how the company stays inside § 6 instead of drifting into reserved advice.

The site is explicit about who should buy.

WHO MIKA SAYS IT IS FOR

• Legal form: A German GmbH or UG, not a sole trader and not a large AG.
• Headcount: Up to 30 people, with no in-house finance team.
• Volume: Fewer than 500 transactions a month and a short list of larger clients.
• Work the AI takes: Invoice checks, booking, VAT pre-returns, dunning and, on higher tiers, a guided annual close.
• Work it will not take: Personal tax advice, which is referred to licensed advisers.

Destatis counted 861,720 corporations on the register for 2024, published in December 2025, including GmbHs, UGs and AGs. Of those, 591,875 had fewer than ten staff. Germany also had 2,062,752 sole traders and 3,543,865 legal units in total. mika is not chasing the sole-trader mass that tools such as sevdesk and lexoffice already serve. It wants the incorporated firm that was told, on week one, to find a Steuerberater.

Against those 591,875 micro corporations, 800 customers is a start. It is also why the seed exists: distribution inside a market where the monthly books still pay a large, repeatable share of a typical practice, and where handing a clean file to an adviser is the cheapest way to keep that practice as a partner instead of a plaintiff.

Smedvig Is Betting on German Tax Complexity

Freddie Kalfayan, a principal at Smedvig Ventures, did not pitch a pan-European copilot. He pitched the fusion of German accounting and German tax, where one bad booking lands on the tax bill.

Nowhere else in Europe is accounting and tax as demanding or costly for small businesses as in Germany, where the two are so tightly linked that a single mistake carries straight through to the tax bill. mika is the first to build for this reality instead of around it, and its customers demonstrate some of the strongest enthusiasm we have seen across our portfolio.

Freddie Kalfayan, principal, Smedvig Ventures

Walorska has said the operating mode is to stay extremely focused on one dense rulebook, then become autonomous inside it. She has also said the quiet social fact that sits under the product.

The moment you start a GmbH in Germany, you’re told you need a tax adviser. It goes so far that some founders think it’s a legal requirement. To me, it’s obvious that this cannot be how it works. At mika, we use AI to tear down that barrier, so that your bank balance or the family you were born into no longer decides who gets to start a company.

Agnieszka Walorska, founder and CEO of mika

Born in Poland, she came to Berlin for political and social science at Humboldt and was employee number seven at studiVZ. The angels in this round include people from that network. The barrier she is describing is cash and confidence as much as code: a small GmbH that cannot afford a full-service Kanzlei, and a founder who was told incorporation comes with a professional retainer attached.

The €6 million does not repeal § 5, and it does not dent DATEV’s 2.8 million organisations. It buys a faster way to do the work Section 6 already permits, at €49 to €99 a month, for a few hundred of the country’s smallest limited companies. The partner adviser remains on the close. The cooperative remains the file format. The chamber still writes the FAQ that says the human keeps the last word.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting on a private funding round and on German accounting and tax-software practice. It is for information only. It is not tax advice, legal advice, or an invitation to invest in mika or any other unlisted company, and it does not tell any reader whether to change accountant, file without an adviser, or buy or sell securities. Anyone deciding how to keep books, file VAT or incorporate in Germany should speak to a licensed Steuerberater or lawyer admitted for that work, and anyone considering an investment should speak to a qualified financial adviser. Figures, customer counts, prices and legal positions are those published by the companies, Destatis, DATEV, IBISWorld, Dealroom and the Federal Chamber of Tax Advisers on the dates given in the piece, and they can change.