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Stratum
About

Finance work should be owned, not outsourced.

Give every growing business a finance function that runs itself, keeps the judgment inside the business, and never does anything material without a person.

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Founded

2026 · Mumbai

Agents

1 live · 2 early access

Design partners

Onboarding now

Manifesto

Five things we believe.

Written before the first line of code, and checked against every feature since.

  1. 01

    Sell the outcome, not the tool

    Nobody wants software for collections. They want the money. An agent that owns a job end to end is worth more than a dashboard that shows the job is not done.

  2. 02

    The brain belongs to the customer

    Everything an agent learns about how a business runs — who to push, who approves, what is normal — is that business's property. Inspectable, exportable, portable. Lock-in is a confession that the product is not good enough to be kept.

  3. 03

    Autonomy stops at the threshold

    Routine work should run without asking. Anything material should always ask. The line between the two is set by the customer and enforced in code.

  4. 04

    Layers, not replacements

    The ledger stays. The accountant stays. The bank stays. Agents are strata laid on top of what already works. Nothing to migrate, nothing to rip out.

  5. 05

    Write down the why

    An action without its reasoning is a liability. Every agent records what it saw and why it acted, at the moment it acts. That is what makes it trustworthy — and auditable.

The story

Why Stratum exists.

Four decisions, in the order we made them.

01

Why finance operations

Most of what a growing company's finance team does is not finance. It is chasing, matching, coding, and re-typing. It is unambiguous, repetitive, and expensive — and most of it is already outsourced to a bookkeeper, a firm, or an offshore team. That work is exactly what an agent can own.

02

Why agents, not automation

Rules-based automation breaks the moment a customer replies with 'we never got this invoice'. An agent reads the reply, understands it, and knows what to do — or knows it should ask. The difference is judgment, and judgment is what finance ops actually runs on.

03

Why the brain must be the customer's

Every business runs on knowledge that lives in one person's head: which customers can be pushed, who actually approves a payment plan, which late payer is fine and which is a warning. Our agents capture that as they work. We decided early that it would be shown in plain language and exportable in full. We would rather be kept because we are useful.

We would rather be kept because we are useful.

04

Where we are now

Stratum was founded in Mumbai in 2026. The Collections Agent is live with our first design partners on QuickBooks Online. Payables and Close are in early access. The rest of the catalog is in development, in the order our design partners need it. We are a small team and we are hiring as partners come on board.

Values

How we decide when it isn't obvious.

Short, because we mean them.

  • 01

    Plain language

    If we cannot explain what the agent did in one sentence, it should not have done it.

  • 02

    Truthful status

    Live means live. Planned means planned. We do not sell a roadmap as a product.

  • 03

    Customer's data, customer's rules

    We ask for the narrowest access, store the least we can, and export everything on request.

  • 04

    Hands on

    We onboard every customer ourselves and sit in the approvals inbox with them for the first month.

  • 05

    Boring is good

    Finance software should be predictable. We ship guardrails before features and logs before dashboards.

Founder

Who is building this.

Prem Shah

Founder

Mumbai, India

LinkedInSmall team, hiring

Prem builds multi-agent systems. Before Stratum he designed and ran an event-driven, multi-agent trading system with strict risk limits and a full decision audit trail — the same architecture, applied to a different ledger. He has shipped AI products across spiritual guidance, personal assistants, and sales-call analysis, and spent most of that time learning where autonomy should stop.

He studies at Tetr College of Business, whose programme has students build a real business in a different country every term — dropshipping in India, a consumer brand in Dubai, a crowdfunded product in China, a social venture in Ghana. Each one came with its own books, its own late payers, and its own bookkeeper.

Stratum started from a simple observation across those businesses and the SMBs around them: the finance work that eats the most time is unowned, outsourced, and unambiguous. It is the best possible job for an agent — as long as the agent never moves money, always asks before anything material, and leaves the judgment with the business.

Milestones

Where we've been. Where we're going.

Dates are quarters, not promises. Planned items move as design partners set the order.

  1. Q1 2026

    Stratum founded in Mumbai

    Started with one thesis: sell the outcome of a finance job, keep the judgment with the customer.

  2. Q2 2026

    Collections Agent built on QuickBooks Online

    First agent, first ledger. Reminder sequencing, reply classification, approvals inbox, and the audit log.

  3. Q3 2026Now

    Collections Agent live with first design partners

    Hands-on deployments with services businesses and startups. The judgment layer becomes exportable.

  4. Q4 2026

    Payables and Close in early access

    Bill capture, approval routing, and continuous reconciliation. Xero integration in progress.

  5. 2027

    Cash, Spend, and Compliance

    The control and intelligence layers, built with accounting-firm and mid-market design partners. Reporting and Planning to follow.

How we work

Small, hands-on, guardrails first.

A handful of people, each owning an agent end to end, sitting in customers' approvals inboxes.

  • Small, senior, in the loop

    A handful of engineers who each own an agent end to end, and who sit in customers' approvals inboxes during onboarding.

  • Design partners set the order

    The roadmap is a queue of jobs real customers have asked us to take. We build the next agent when the previous one is boring.

  • Guardrails first

    Every agent starts with the list of things it must never do, enforced in code, before it does anything at all.

  • Mumbai-based, worldwide customers

    We work across time zones with customers in India, the US, and the UK. Async by default, on a call when it matters.

Field notes

Read how we think.

Five essays on where an agent's autonomy should stop, why collections came first, and why the brain must belong to the customer.

Read the essaysSee the agents