In a typical group, finance is likely one of 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 advised 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 recordsdata for budgeting, forecasting, and different core monetary planning actions.
After experiencing these frustrations firsthand whereas main progress at fintech agency Jeeves, Hafemeister determined to workforce up with Ted Michaels, Jeeves’ earlier head of finance and an previous good friend, to launch a platform to automate monetary duties.
Referred to as Concourse, the platform connects to a companies’ monetary programs to let finance groups retrieve and analyze information, generate charts, and ask ad-hoc questions corresponding 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 mentioned. “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 expertise. Linq not too long ago emerged from stealth with AI to automate elements of analysis for monetary analysts. Ledge and Doopla are additionally constructing a spread of finance-specific generative modeling instruments.
However what makes Concourse totally different, in accordance with Hafemeister, is its skill to execute monetary workflows with “complex, multi-step operations.” For instance, the platform can retrieve information from an organization’s NetSuite dashboard to obtain CSV recordsdata, then copy that information 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 at the moment are utilizing some type of AI expertise, 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 available in the market for finance automation tech, Concourse must exhibit its product’s ROI — a difficult feat. Per Gartner, displaying or estimating the worth of AI is a high barrier to adopting it for near half of corporations.
Concourse will even should assuage potential prospects’ fears of AI-introduced errors and hallucinations. In a ballot of U.Okay.-based executives by HR specialist Peninsula, 40% mentioned inaccuracies from AI instruments had been a key concern, adopted by considerations round information confidentiality.
Hafemeister mentioned 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 corporations’ information to coach its AI fashions — at the least not with out express permission — and that the platform solely collects information prospects share with it.
“Data accuracy is paramount in finance, where answers are typically either entirely correct or entirely incorrect,” Hafemeister mentioned. “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 keen to be take Hafemeister at his phrase.
Concourse, which continues to be in beta forward of a broader launch deliberate for subsequent yr, has a number of prospects, 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 target in the meanwhile is product growth and rising New York-based Concourse’s six-person employees.
“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 mentioned. “The strong focus on engineering recruiting is to hire backend, machine learning, and AI engineers.”
