A year ago, we set out to fix finance for lean teams. We didn't ship a product for the first twelve months. We had conversations, over four hundred of them.

That's by design. At Builders, we don't build before we understand the problem deeply enough to be dangerous. And finance, it turns out, is a domain where being wrong is very expensive.

So Bruno started calling CFOs, finance leads, and controllers at SMBs and growth-stage companies. Not to pitch. To listen. And the same frustration kept surfacing, worded differently every time, but pointing at the same broken moment: the point where an invoice arrives, context is missing, and someone spends twenty minutes figuring out how to book it.

Multiply that by five hundred invoices a month. Add month-end cleanup, supplier follow-ups, and the corrections that slip through anyway. And you arrive at a number that quietly eats finance teams alive: €40,000 a year, minimum, in time lost to pre-accounting work that shouldn't require a human at all.

The pivot that made sense

We started with a broader vision - an AI-native financial intelligence platform, FP&A for lean teams, foresight before the board asks. That vision still holds. But we learned something important in those four hundred conversations: you can't give finance teams strategic clarity when they're buried in operational chaos.

Pre-accounting is where finance breaks first. It's where the manual work never ends, where exceptions pile up, and where the clean data that everything else depends on either gets produced or doesn't. Fix that layer, and you earn the right to build everything else on top.

So that's where Cortena starts.

What we built

Cortena is a finance operating system where AI agents handle the operational work. Starting with invoice pre-accounting, directly inside DATEV, Exact Online and Twinfield.

You connect your stack. We train the agent on your chart of accounts, your booking history, your exceptions. Within seven days, the agent is handling ninety percent of your invoice volume, booking-ready, without manual cleanup. You review only what needs a human eye.

No exports. No Excel. No moving files between tabs.

It's not a dashboard that shows you what's broken. It's an agent that runs the work.

Who's behind it

Cortena is a Builders venture - built inside our studio in Rotterdam, with our process, our team, and our backing. That's not a disclaimer. It's part of what makes this work: a founding team supported from day one with the infrastructure, the network, and the capital to get to a real product without burning out on the wrong problems first.

This year, Cortena also secured a Rabobank Innovation Loan. One of the most rigorous innovation finance instruments in the Netherlands. It's a signal from one of Europe's largest banks that the thesis is sound, the team is credible, and the company is built to last.

We're not fragile. We're properly backed and properly focused.

What comes next

Pre-accounting is the entry point. The roadmap extends into reconciliation, payables, receivables, treasury, and planning - a full autonomous finance layer that follows your rules and runs end to end.

That's a multi-year build. We're starting where the pain is sharpest, with customers who've already stopped doing it by hand. And we're expanding from there.

If you're a finance lead, CFO, or founder tired of the monthly chaos, try Cortena, or book a call with Bruno directly. After four hundred conversations, he probably already knows what's broken in your stack.

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Cortena is a Builders portfolio company. Learn more at cortena.ai