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The fintech’s expansion into bookkeeping and month-end close comes as accounting firms confront a gap between AI ambition and workforce readiness.
OCTA’s latest funding round marks a change in the work Gulf-linked financial technology companies are trying to automate. After starting with the movement of invoices and payments, the business is moving further into the accounting work that follows those transactions, with professional firms remaining responsible for the final output.
The company has raised $3.5 million in seed funding led by Middle East Venture Partners. Wa’ed Ventures, Plug and Play and A-typical Ventures participated alongside existing investors Sukna Ventures and Sadu Capital. OCTA says the capital will support engineering, additional accounting workflows and international expansion, with the United States central to its plans.
The development connects two questions facing the profession: how much recurring accounting work software can perform, and where human review must sit when that work becomes increasingly automated. For firms serving small businesses, that distinction affects both how they allocate staff and how they deliver accounts to clients.
From collecting invoices to preparing the books
OCTA’s earlier business focused on accounts receivable and payable, including invoicing, collections and payments. Its Core platform still addresses financial operations inside businesses. The newer Flow product targets accounting firms themselves, putting the company on a different side of the relationship between a small business and the people managing its books.
That is a meaningful change in the customer being served. Software used by a company’s finance team works within that company’s operations. Software used by an accounting practice must support work across multiple clients, each with its own records, transactions and review requirements. The shift broadens the scope beyond helping a business collect an invoice.
The regional origins of OCTA’s model are visible in its financing activity. The company previously announced a $20 million credit facility from Sukna Fund for Direct Financing, launched for small and medium-sized businesses in Saudi Arabia. That facility supports access to working capital against receivables. It is a different instrument from the latest seed investment and should not be added to the equity round as though both were the same type of funding.
The distinction also separates two economic problems. Invoice finance addresses the interval between issuing a bill and receiving payment. Accounting automation addresses the work needed to record, reconcile and interpret financial activity. OCTA now has operations touching both, although financing available to customers is not a measure of the software company’s revenue.
AI adoption meets a skills gap
Independent research suggests accounting and finance leaders expect substantial change, but many organisations are still preparing for it. An AICPA and CIMA survey published in December 2025 found that 88% of respondents considered AI the most transformative technology trend for accounting and finance over the following 12 to 24 months.
Only 8% described their organisation as very well prepared to manage that trend, while another 21% said it was well prepared. Half identified shortages of people, skills and talent as the biggest barrier to technology adoption. Security concerns and doubts about technological maturity were also prominent.
The survey covered 1,446 senior finance and accounting leaders and managers worldwide, with responses collected in August and September 2025. It is evidence of a broader readiness gap, rather than a measurement of adoption among Gulf accounting practices specifically. The findings nevertheless help explain why introducing software and changing the way a firm works are separate tasks.
The American expansion has a workforce context
OCTA’s focus on the United States places its expansion in a market where accounting recruitment and the supply of graduates have been moving in different directions. The AICPA’s 2025 Trends report found that the number of bachelor’s and master’s accounting graduates fell to 55,152 in the 2023–24 academic year, down 6.6% from the previous year.
At the same time, three-quarters of responding firms that recruited in 2024 expected to hire the same number of staff or more in 2025. Those figures describe respondents’ hiring intentions, not completed hiring across the entire American profession. The AICPA also cautioned that a low firm response rate prevented a confident projection of total new-graduate hiring.
The picture was not uniformly one of contraction. The report cited two consecutive semesters of 12% year-on-year growth in accounting enrolment during the 2024–25 school year. For software investors, the relevant context is therefore a profession trying to expand capacity while rebuilding its talent pipeline, rather than evidence that human recruitment has stopped.
Review remains part of the work
OCTA says Flow carries out bookkeeping, reconciliations and month-end close, with accountants reviewing and approving outputs before delivery to clients. It reports that more than 520 firms signed up for access within six weeks and that the system processed 172,000 transactions in August 2026. These are company-reported activity figures; access registrations do not establish a count of paying customers.
The emphasis on review has a parallel in the profession’s own workforce planning. In a September 2026 update, the AICPA said its Profession Ready Initiative had engaged more than 1,000 members and stakeholders. Its findings highlighted professional judgment, the ability to question results and appropriate oversight of technology alongside accounting fundamentals.
The AICPA plans to release a draft skills and competency framework for public comment in early 2027. As OCTA deploys its new capital, accounting firms will therefore be assessing software and professional training together: which work can be delegated to a system, and which skills people need to evaluate what comes back.
