The Rillet AI Finance Summit

We hosted our inaugural Rillet AI Summit in San Francisco and the energy was nothing short of electric.

We gathered 221 AI-Native CFOs and Controllers in the room with speakers from Sequoia Capital, Lovable, Vercel, Runway, Windsurf and Twilio. The value on these leaders time is insanely expensive so we made sure to maximize every minute with practical speaking sessions and a (literally) hands-on vibe coding speedrun where everyone built their own applications.

Here are the highlights:

1. Roelof Botha: Dare to Dream

Our investor and board member, Roelof Botha, shared his journey from immigrating to the U.S. from South Africa to becoming Managing Partner of Sequoia Capital. He challenged us to "dare to dream" and steward our organizations with purpose.

Roelof also gave the room a rare glimpse into Sequoia’s process of evaluating over 10,000 companies a year, and why they chose to back Rillet as the financial system of record for the AI era.

2. The AI CFO Panel: Redefining the Role

We brought together an incredible lineup of AI-era finance leaders: Marten Abrahamsen (CFO, Vercel), Mary M. Liu (CFO, Runway), Adam Strouss (VP Finance, Windsurf), and Lee Kirkpatrick (former CFO, Twilio). Each of them brought a unique perspective, from Marten’s experience helping Vercel navigate usage-based pricing, to Mary’s view on how AI is reshaping the finance stack inside design-first companies, to Adam’s lens as an emerging AI startup operator, and Lee’s wisdom from scaling Twilio through IPO. The panel dove into some of the hardest questions finance leaders face today: how to price AI products, what it means to sunset ARR as usage models take over, and how the role of CFO is evolving in real time.

3. The First-Ever Finance Hackathon

Lovable CTO, Fabian Hedin, teamed up with Audrey Kim, Partner at Oak HC/FT, to lead the world’s first finance hackathon. Instead of watching from the sidelines, CFOs and Controllers actually got hands-on, rolling up their sleeves to vibe-code their way through real challenges. In just a short window of time, the leaders built everything from custom CRMs to option pricing calculators, close checklists, and margin analysis tools. What stood out wasn’t just the creativity, but the speed—finance leaders prototyping solutions in just 30 minutes what would have taken weeks in the past. It was a rare glimpse into the future and how AI-native finance leaders operate.

A few of our favorite projects:

Jake Cochrane, VP Finance at Omni, built a Rev Rec Dashboard.

Luke McKinlay, CFO at Nuvo, built an Options Valuation Calculator.

Alex Brockman, Controller at Luxury Presence built a Close Checklist.

Aamna Zia, CFO at Wallx, built a Financial Modeling Tool.

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4. Building a Community

At the close of the Summit, we made sure to carve out time just for people to connect. At Rillet, we're not just building new software or new workflows. We're building a community of people who are rewriting what finance and accounting will look like in the AI era. The room came alive as CFOs and Controllers shared their vibe-coding success and failures, swapped stories, traded hard-won lessons, and even began sketching out what their next chapters could look like together. At the end of the day, it's never about software. It's about people.

Thank You

To everyone who joined us: thank you for being part of the beginning of something big.

To our partners and sponsors: this event wouldn’t have been possible without your support.

And to the CFOs, Controllers, and finance leaders who are daring to imagine the future: this is just the start. We're already planning the next one.

Stay tuned!

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