Sirius: The Moldovan Startup Bringing AI to Business Accounting

Sirius Software, an 11-person startup based in Chisinau, is positioning itself as a modern alternative to the legacy Russian accounting systems that still dominate business in Moldova. The company’s AI-powered platform automates invoice processing and financial workflows for small businesses and accounting practices, and it has attracted roughly €360,000 in external investment as it prepares to expand into Romania.

The pitch is straightforward. Moldova’s accounting infrastructure runs almost entirely on 1C, a software platform developed in Russia that has been the default for businesses and government agencies across the former Soviet Union for decades. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, 1C drew scrutiny from authorities across the region over cybersecurity and national security concerns. Moldova’s prime minister, Vasile Tofan, acknowledged in August 2026 that 1C poses a security risk but warned that banning it outright would leave accountants without tools and risk significant backlash from businesses dependent on the software. Alternatives, he noted, are few and expensive.

Sirius Software is trying to fill that gap. Co-founders Alexandru Vapilov and Traian Chivriga started the company roughly four to five years ago after working on a project to automate the processing of bank statements. The original goal was narrow: eliminate the need for users to repeatedly log into online banking portals to download transaction data. The founders built the tool for themselves, then realised accountants faced the same friction at far greater scale. They began developing a full platform.

The product’s most prominent feature is AI-driven invoice processing. In a typical 1C workflow, an accountant manually keys in each invoice, a process that can consume days when a business handles dozens or hundreds of documents per period. Sirius Software allows users to photograph invoices and upload them to the platform, where the AI extracts and indexes the relevant data automatically. The company’s own case study, self-reported, describes an accountant who previously spent several days manually entering approximately 50 electronic invoices into 1C. Using the Sirius platform, the same task reportedly took around 10 minutes.

Those numbers have not been independently verified. The company claims its platform serves “thousands of entrepreneurs and hundreds of accountants” in Moldova, though it has not disclosed specific user counts, retention figures, or revenue. For a country of roughly 3 million people with a relatively small formal business sector, the addressable market is modest by international standards.

The platform also handles invoicing, payment tracking, and integration with Moldova’s national e-invoicing system. Users can generate invoices from a mobile device in under 60 seconds, according to the company. Sirius Software frames this as a fundamental shift in how accounting works, though the feature set, stripped of its AI marketing, is broadly comparable to what established cloud accounting platforms like Xero, QuickBooks, and FreshBooks have offered in Western markets for years. The difference is context. Those platforms have limited presence in Moldova, and localisation for Moldovan tax law, language, and regulatory requirements is not trivial.

The team is small. Ten employees are based in Moldova, with one in Ukraine. The company participated in the EU4Youth programme, a European Union initiative co-funded with Lithuania’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which provided grant funding, mentorship, and training. Vapilov has said the programme helped the founders shift from a coding-focused sprint mentality to thinking more strategically about unit economics and long-term sustainability. The grant itself funded three months of office rent and initial marketing campaigns, which the company credits with helping it move from beta users to paying customers.

Sirius Software plans to enter Romania next, a market with roughly six times Moldova’s population and its own legacy of 1C-adjacent accounting systems. Romania’s adoption of e-invoicing mandates in recent years has created both demand for modern tools and a crowded field of local and international competitors. Whether a Moldovan startup with €360,000 in total funding can compete against better-capitalised Romanian and European incumbents remains an open question.

The founders are explicit that they do not see AI as a replacement for accountants. The platform is designed to handle data entry and document processing, not professional judgment, tax advisory, or audit. That framing is sensible. The accounting profession’s talent shortage is real, and tools that reduce the time accountants spend on manual data handling do address a genuine bottleneck, particularly in markets where legacy software has kept workflows largely manual.

To be sure, Sirius Software is very early-stage. The investment total is small by any measure. The team is lean. The domestic market is limited. And the competitive dynamics of cross-border expansion into Romania, where local players already have regulatory expertise and distribution, will test whether the product can stand on its own outside the specific conditions that created demand for it in Moldova. The 1C replacement narrative is compelling in a geopolitical moment, but building a sustainable accounting platform requires more than being the alternative to a Russian product that governments would prefer businesses stopped using.