Ghent-based startup wants to catch operational drift before it shows up in financial statements
Most finance chiefs discover trouble the old-fashioned way: when it lands in the monthly profit-and-loss statement, weeks after the underlying shift began. By then, a spike in customer acquisition costs or an unexpected wave of cancellations has already altered the trajectory.
Peaky, a Belgian fintech built to surface those gaps earlier, said it raised €1.1 million in seed funding led by JK Invest, with participation from imec.istart, Super Capital and a handful of Belgian angels including Roeland Delrue of Aikido Security and Thierry Bruyneel of delaware. The company announced the round in mid-September 2026, according to FD Magazine.
The Ghent-based startup connects accounting, CRM, HR and billing systems to build financial models that update continuously. Its "Signals" engine monitors business drivers across platforms like Exact, Yuki, QuickBooks, Stripe, HubSpot, Sage, Deel and SD Worx, flagging when operational reality starts to drift from plan assumptions. A lengthening sales cycle, rising churn, shifting pricing dynamics—Peaky surfaces these in real time rather than waiting for them to crystallize in backward-looking financials, the company says.
The platform targets CFOs and CEOs at scaling companies, the kind who need rolling forecasts and headcount modeling tied to live data instead of static spreadsheets. Peaky counts Aikido Security, Proplanner, Tout Bien, Mobility Plus and The Harbour among its customers, FD Magazine reported. The startup won Best FinTech Startup of the Year at the Digital Finance Awards Belgium in June and graduated from the imec.istart accelerator earlier this year.
CEO Ser Cappelle spent 16 years in finance—most recently as a fractional CFO—before co-founding Peaky with CTO Guus De Graeve, COO Willem Vos and CDO John-Alexander Kolmus in 2025. De Graeve began his career as a full-stack developer at Netlog in 2009, according to his LinkedIn profile. FD Magazine noted the founders have prior ties to Netlog, Twoo, Ablo and Tinder, a constellation of consumer social products that perhaps explains the team's emphasis on user experience in a traditionally stodgy category.
The company employs somewhere between two and 10 people, LinkedIn indicates. Now Peaky plans to use the fresh capital to hire AI engineers, build out its Signals engine and driver-based modeling features, and push commercial growth across Europe, FD Magazine reported.
When Peaky announced the round, the company claimed about 90 percent of the financial planning market is U.S.-based. The startup positions itself as Europe-focused, integrating with region-specific accounting and payroll platforms including Exact, Yuki, SD Worx and Odoo alongside the global names. That geographic angle matters in a market where localization—tax rules, labor structures, accounting standards—can make or break adoption.
JK Invest, the Brussels-based early-stage investor leading the round, typically writes checks between €200,000 and €2 million for B2B SaaS companies, according to the firm's site. Imec.istart, the Belgian accelerator, invests an initial €100,000 via convertible loan and can follow with up to €300,000 total, program materials show. Super Capital, the Paris-based angel collective, invests €50,000 to €300,000 per startup.
"In finance, it often only shows up in next month's numbers," Cappelle told FD Magazine in September. "By then you've already lost weeks."
The company is hiring for AI engineering roles and plans to expand across Europe, Vos wrote on LinkedIn when the round was announced. The startup aims to become "the European standard for companies that want to scale without surprises," De Graeve said in an interview with TechPulse published September 17—a characteristically bold ambition for a seed-stage company, though not an unusual one in the current climate where finance automation has become something of a quiet battleground among venture-backed startups racing to modernize what remains, in many midsize companies, an Excel-driven function.
