This AI Startup is Giving Away the Playbook to Kill Its Own Category

The enterprise software industry built a $50B business by selling CFOs one more tool for every finance problem. Daylit, an AI agents for Accounts Receivable (AR) platform, is betting that era is over — and giving away the tools to help accelerate its transformation.

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Today, the AI startup — fresh off a $110M capital raise in September — is open-sourcing the playbook it has run privately with customers: a free, weekly program teaching customers to build with AI, aimed at the legacy AR software providers it intends to displace.

The numbers from early customers are the kind that reprice a category. Daylit customers see AR operating costs down more than 75%, collections on high-risk accounts tripling, all while saving 40+ hours of manual follow-up for every 200 accounts per week. One customer — a PE-backed HVAC roll-up across 14 markets — saw ROI within 30 days, grew current AR 20%, and redeployed full-time headcount to higher-value work.

“The end of SaaS is coming, and we’re helping our customers and future customers get there faster,” said Jared Shulman, Co-founder and CEO of Daylit. “The sooner people become comfortable ditching dashboards and managing both humans and AI agents, the sooner they can truly automate the mundane.”

“This course is just the start,” adds Jerry Shu, Daylit’s Co-founder and CTO. “No CFO is going to pay six figures a year for software and then another six figures for its AI layer. The investment in the AI layer is clearly a stronger ROI, so we’re helping people get there faster.”

The Thesis: “Headless Finance”

Daylit likens the approach to headless finance — running collections, reconciliation, credit analysis, and the rest of order-to-cash through AI agents the finance team orchestrates, not off-the-shelf SaaS. The training teaches customers to build AI skills — structured workflow blueprints any AI model can execute as SOPs. The point is a repeatable, auditable way to replace SaaS tools, not another prompt to remember. The bet cuts against the dominant enterprise-AI narrative: incumbents bolting GenAI onto legacy products and charging a premium. Daylit argues the economics don’t hold, and finance teams will soon prefer to leverage task-specific AI agents that deliver outcomes over legacy SaaS tools.

What’s in the Program

This ten-week, hands-on course includes modules for the most painful manual tasks typically addressed through expensive, legacy software. The audience will walk away with free Skills.md files and the tools required to completely replace them, including:

• Automated invoice validation — catching errors before invoices leave the building
• Bank-to-invoice matching — end-to-end cash application without manual reconciliation
• AI-generated credit reports — investigative-depth analysis on every customer

The training is built for controllers, AR and AP leaders, accounting managers, and CFO-track professionals who are interested in building with AI experimentation and ready to make an operational impact.

A Customer Perspective

“I’ve worked across roll-ups, private equity portfolios, and restructurings, and one thing always becomes clear: you can’t fake efficiency. Fast-moving finance teams need real leverage, and AI is how they create it now. Daylit is a platform I keep bringing with me because it delivers every time. What seals it for me is the new AI Skills platform — it shows they’re invested in making my team better, not just earning a renewal,” said Melanie Salmonsen, finance transformation consultant.

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