Kestrel started with two agency finance leads who were tired of closing every month in spreadsheets: receipts chased in Slack, client tags rebuilt by hand, margins worked out after the invoices had already gone. Corporate card tools treat spend as a cost to cut. At an agency most of it is a client’s money passing through, so it has to be tagged to a client, approved by whoever runs the account and rebilled at month-end. We built Kestrel to do exactly that.
Usage figures from a survey of 214 customer workspaces, July 2026.
Co-founder, CEO
Co-founder, head of product
CTO
Design lead
Finance success lead
Platform engineer
We build for agencies and nobody else. A feature has to make sense for a studio that bills by the hour and passes spend through to clients, or it waits. That’s why client budgets shipped before expense policies, and why we still don’t sell to in-house finance teams.
Finance leads should hear about a problem before the client does. Most of what we ship moves a number earlier in the month: the overspend alert at 80% instead of on the invoice, the missing receipt chased on the 27th instead of the 4th.
Everyone answers support, founders included. Each of us takes a support shift every week, and a human replies within a working day. It’s slower to scale, and it’s where most of the roadmap comes from.
Fully remote across Europe, with a week together every quarter.