It’s not the sexiest of topic issues, however somebody wants to speak about it: The CFO tech stack — software program utilized by the chief monetary officers of the world — is ripe for disruption. That’s based on Jonathan Sanders, CEO and co-founder of fledgling Danish startup Gentle, which exits stealth Wednesday with $13 million in a seed spherical of funding led by European VC large Atomico.
The Copenhagen-based startup is reimagining common ledger software program from the bottom up, replete with AI to cleanse transactional knowledge, whereas additionally enabling finance groups to ask plain-English questions and obtain easy solutions from their knowledge.
Gentle leans on automated ledgers
With stints at firms together with funding financial institution Credit score Suisse and SMB-focused expense administration scale-up Pleo, Sanders has affordable perception into the working setting of the CFO’s workplace. Enterprise useful resource planning (ERP) software program is king, packing assist for CRM (buyer relationship administration), HR (human assets), venture administration, and maybe essentially the most essential part of all, the final ledger.
A common ledger is an all-encompassing document of an organization’s monetary transactions, recording each greenback, dime and penny that comes out and in. For the chief monetary officer, it’s vital, serving as a single supply of reality into an organization’s monetary well being. And it’s this factor of the ERP that Gentle is concentrated on dragging into the fashionable digital period, the place AI more and more guidelines the roost.
“Our mission is to be the first automated ledger for global companies,” Sanders advised TechCrunch. “We believe CFOs and finance teams deserve the full benefits of AI, gaining the full knowledge and expertise of a large enterprise organization when it comes to accounting and taxes, something that they have been denied to date.”
Firms combine Gentle with their carious CRM and HRM instruments, their banks and even their communication channels corresponding to Microsoft Groups and Slack. The “AI” within the platform constitutes a mixture of fashions, every serving distinct functions for the finance fraternity. This may be to deal with guide duties corresponding to line-item coding (i.e. assigning codes to particular person transactions), figuring out appropriate tax codes and associated bookkeeping duties.
“We use one model to help bookkeep all line items with correct taxes and accounts, and we use another model to help the C-suite to ask questions about revenue, costs and profit — directly from Slack,” Sanders mentioned. “We have, and continue to experiment with, a mix of off-the-shelf models and fine-tuned open source models as the AI landscape is changing rapidly.”
By unbundling the ERP, Gentle is giving one thing of a middle-finger to legacy functions corresponding to Oracle NetSuite, SAP ERP and Microsoft Dynamics, whereas additionally taking up “younger” upstarts corresponding to Quickbooks and Xero. The corporate is concentrating on “multi-entity international companies” with the promise of a unified dashboard for all their world transactions, one which’s “fully searchable and queryable using AI.”
The is all the results of Sanders’ personal private frustrations of working with established ERP techniques.
“I remember one time, I was working with the finance team on some report from the ERP system, and it took the page more than 20 seconds to load — I asked why the Wi-Fi was so slow,” Sanders mentioned. “They said it wasn’t the Wi-Fi that was the problem, it was the product. I immediately knew something had to be done.”
On high of that, Sanders additionally touts a slicker “Apple-like” interface design, one which finance groups may not hate utilizing.
The lengthy and wanting that is that relatively than providing issues like CRM, HR or venture administration, Gentle solely serves options corresponding to accounts receivable (AR), accounts payable (AP), bookkeeping, VAT reporting and extra.
However why trouble unbundling within the first place?
Whereas having a totally featured ERP is smart for some companies, as an illustration the place there must be a decent alignment between gross sales, provide chain and workforce knowledge (e.g. in manufacturing), this isn’t the case for a lot of (and even most) companies at the moment — companies which might be already utilizing standalone instruments that historically existed in a ERP platform.
“We’ve chosen to focus on the general ledger to build a clean and focused product — this is the hardest, and most important, problem to solve for modern finance teams,” Sanders mentioned. “Modern companies use the best CRM, like Salesforce; and the best HR software, like Workday or Factorial. But there’s no global ledger that is unbundled from the ERP suite, so you are forced to implement a full-stack ERP with embedded CRM and HRM products you never use.”
Bought as a subscription with volume-based pricing, Gentle additionally hopes to focus on a brand new breed of firm weary of legacy software program priced on a per-seat foundation that in the end limits entry to a choose few within the firm. Thus, Gentle is pretty broad when it comes to figuring out a goal market — the one factor that they could have in frequent is a need to scale globally.
“The primary day-to-day users are finance teams, including the CFO,” Sanders mentioned. “Whether the company is 50 employees or 5,000, they can leverage Light for their global operations. We focused on making the interface with the rest of the business seamless, so anyone with the right permissions can easily approve invoices, upload expenses and query vendor information or reports.”
Gentle work
After leaving his place as head of funds at Pleo in 2020, Sanders went on to discovered one other fintech firm known as Juni, which develops instruments to assist e-commerce firms handle their funds higher. That startup went on to boost north of $280 million, however Sanders left in 2022. He maintains that there was nothing notably acrimonious about his departure.
“We wanted to take the company in different directions — I remain a happy shareholder, cheering from the sidelines,” Sanders mentioned.
And so in 2023, Sanders integrated Gentle, and though it has been working in stealth for the previous 12 months, the platform is already technically dwell and obtainable globally. The lion’s share of its present prospects hail from the Nordics, together with Worksome, Lenus, Famly and Proxify — that is one thing that Sanders says positions his personal firm nicely to thrive.
“In the Nordics, as well as in other smaller countries in Europe, companies have to be global from day one,” Sanders mentioned. “This means that as soon as you find commercial traction, you need to open legal entities in other countries and your financial backbone breaks. Our mission is to help these companies early on in their journey to go global and unshackle them from the burdens of existing legacy solutions.”
Other than lead backer Atomico, Gentle’s seed spherical additionally included participation from Cherry Ventures, Entrée Capital, Seedcamp, and angels corresponding to German soccer participant Mario Götze.
