OCTA Closes $3.5M Seed Round Led by Middle East Venture Partners

OCTA has closed a US$3.5 million seed round led by Middle East Venture Partners. Wa'ed Ventures, Plug and Play and A-typical Ventures joined as new participants, alongside existing investors Sukna Ventures and Sadu Capital. Total funding for the company now stands at US$5.6 million.

The capital lands as OCTA pushes OCTA Flow, a product built around AI agents that handle bookkeeping, reconciliations and month-end closing. Accountants review and approve the agents' output before anything reaches a client. That review step is not incidental. It is the premise the company sells on.

More than 520 firms signed up for access within six weeks of launch. Onboarding is under way.

Sign-ups are not revenue, and the intake sets the commercial test for the new money: converting interested firms into firms that run client work on the platform rather than trialling it.

Jon Santillan, co-founder and CEO, keeps the accountant at the centre. The accountant owns the client relationship, reads the context and answers for the finished work, he says. What AI alters is how much of that work has to be produced by hand. Hand an accounting firm more operating leverage and the firm itself comes out stronger.

Nupur Mittal, co-founder and COO, puts the change in terms of what software does. Firms have used software as a means of getting work done. AI, on her account, allows the software to produce the work itself. Someone must still review it, exercise judgment and stand behind the outcome, and that requirement, she argues, leaves accounting firms in a strong position rather than a vulnerable one.

OCTA began with accounts receivable and accounts payable. Its platform processed 172,000 transactions in August 2026, a volume the company estimates freed more than US$75,000 in billable capacity.

The business started in Saudi Arabia and the UAE and has since moved into the US. The new money is earmarked for AI and engineering capability, for automating more financial workflows and for further expansion.

The pitch runs against a familiar constraint in accounting: firms carry fixed headcount and absorb work in bursts. Agents that take over preparation shift the bottleneck from producing the work to checking it, which changes how engagements are priced and staffed.

An earlier arrangement shapes the picture. In June 2025 OCTA secured a US$20 million credit facility from Sukna Fund, backing embedded working capital financing for small and medium-sized businesses in Saudi Arabia. Accounting firms sit beside the financial records of the companies they serve. That makes them a distribution channel for lending and payments products, and it makes ownership of the client relationship the thing AI vendors are competing to reach. OCTA's bet is that the checking stays with humans, and the client stays with the firm.

The near-term work is onboarding the firms already in the queue.