In a typical group, finance is among the most essential features. But groups are sometimes slowed down by guide workflows. Based on a survey by Paylocity, an HR software program supplier, 38% of finance groups spend greater than a fourth of their time on guide jobs, like reviewing invoices.
Matthieu Hafemeister, an ex-fintech investor at Andreessen Horowitz, says he’s seen many finance orgs wrestle to scale up on account of all of the work they’re doing by hand.
“The status quo for finance is countless point solutions that are cobbled together within the finance department,” Hafemeister instructed TechCrunch. “Excel continues to be the lowest common denominator, limiting the promise of automation.”
To Hafemeister’s level, most finance departments are certainly closely reliant on spreadsheets. One survey discovered that 82% nonetheless use Excel information for budgeting, forecasting, and different core monetary planning actions.
After experiencing these frustrations firsthand whereas main progress at fintech agency Jeeves, Hafemeister determined to crew up with Ted Michaels, Jeeves’ earlier head of finance and an outdated good friend, to launch a platform to automate monetary duties.
Known as Concourse, the platform connects to a companies’ monetary programs to let finance groups retrieve and analyze knowledge, generate charts, and ask ad-hoc questions equivalent to “What’s our non-GAAP revenue?”
“Concourse can proactively surface insights that allow finance teams to be better prepared by enabling them to stay ahead of trends,” Hafemeister stated. “Instead of a tool that tries to improve the speed or efficiency of completing a task, Concourse can be given discrete tasks to do entirely on its own.”
Now, finance automation isn’t precisely new know-how. Linq just lately emerged from stealth with AI to automate features of analysis for monetary analysts. Ledge and Doopla are additionally constructing a variety of finance-specific generative modeling instruments.
However what makes Concourse totally different, in line with Hafemeister, is its means to execute monetary workflows with “complex, multi-step operations.” For instance, the platform can retrieve knowledge from an organization’s NetSuite dashboard to obtain CSV information, then copy that knowledge to an Excel spreadsheet.
“We leverage large language models to do what they are best suited for and pair them with more traditional methods of data analysis,” Hafemeister defined.
There’s nice curiosity in AI for finance. One ballot discovered that 58% of finance groups are actually utilizing some type of AI know-how, up 21% from 2023. Grand View Analysis estimates that the “AI in fintech” phase, value $9.45 billion three years in the past, is rising 16.5% yearly.
However to face an opportunity of constructing a dent out there for finance automation tech, Concourse should reveal its product’s ROI — a difficult feat. Per Gartner, exhibiting or estimating the worth of AI is a high barrier to adopting it for near half of firms.
Concourse will even need to assuage potential clients’ fears of AI-introduced errors and hallucinations. In a ballot of U.Okay.-based executives by HR specialist Peninsula, 40% stated inaccuracies from AI instruments have been a key concern, adopted by issues round knowledge confidentiality.
Hafemeister stated that Concourse employs “a variety of tools and techniques” for fact-checking and validation to attempt to make sure its AI performs duties as supposed. He added that Concourse doesn’t use firms’ knowledge to coach its AI fashions — at the very least not with out specific permission — and that the platform solely collects knowledge clients share with it.
“Data accuracy is paramount in finance, where answers are typically either entirely correct or entirely incorrect,” Hafemeister stated. “As such, at Concourse we’ve spent a lot of time and effort on delivering AI that can accurately perform the task it’s been assigned. We also take data privacy and security very seriously, and have built Concourse using industry best practices.”
Of us appear prepared to be take Hafemeister at his phrase.
Concourse, which continues to be in beta forward of a broader launch deliberate for subsequent 12 months, has a number of clients, together with Instabase and Shef, and $4.7 million in capital. Hafemeister’s ex-employer, a16z, has invested within the startup, together with Y Combinator, CRV, and Field Group.
Hafemeister says the main focus in the meanwhile is product growth and rising New York-based Concourse’s six-person workers.
“We raised money to hire more engineers, build out more workflows that our AI can take on, increase coverage on data integrations, and start to scale our go-to-market function,” he stated. “The strong focus on engineering recruiting is to hire backend, machine learning, and AI engineers.”
