In a typical organization, finance is one of the most important functions. Yet teams are often hamstrung by manual workflows. According to a investigation According to Paylocity, an HR software provider, 38% of finance teams spend more than a quarter of their time on manual tasks, like reviewing invoices.
Matthieu Hafemeister, a former fintech investor at Andreessen Horowitz, says he has seen many financial organizations struggle to grow because of all the work they do manually.
“The status quo in finance consists of countless one-off solutions that are cobbled together within the finance department,” Hafemeister told TechCrunch. “Excel continues to be the lowest common denominator, which limits the promise of automation.”
According to Hafemeister, most finance departments rely heavily on spreadsheets. A investigation found that 82% still use Excel files for budgeting, forecasting and other basic financial planning activities.
After experiencing these frustrations first-hand while leading the growth of a fintech company JeevesHafemeister decided to partner with Ted Michaels, Jeeves’ former CFO and an old friend, to launch a platform for automating financial tasks.
Called CrowdThe platform connects to a company’s financial systems to allow finance teams to retrieve and analyze data, generate charts, and ask ad hoc questions such as “What is our non-GAAP revenue?” »
“Concourse can proactively surface insights that make finance teams better prepared by allowing them to stay ahead of trends,” Hafemeister said. “Instead of a tool that attempts to improve the speed or efficiency of completing a task, Concourse can be given separate tasks to complete entirely on its own.”
However, financial automation is not really a new technology. Linq recently came out of stealth using AI to automate certain aspects of research for financial analysts. Flange And Doopla are also developing a range of generative modeling tools specific to finance.
But what sets Concourse apart, according to Hafemeister, is its ability to run financial workflows with “complex, multi-step operations.” For example, the platform can retrieve data from a company’s NetSuite dashboard to download CSV files, then copy that data into an Excel spreadsheet.
“We leverage large language models to do what they are best suited for and combine them with more traditional data analysis methods,” Hafemeister explained.
There is great interest in AI for finance. A A survey found that 58% of finance teams now use some form of AI technology, up 21% from 2023. Grand View Research estimates that the “AI in fintech” segment, which was worth $9.45 billion three years ago, is experiencing annual growth of 16.5%.
But to have any chance of breaking into the financial automation technology market, Concourse will need to demonstrate the ROI of its product – a difficult feat. By Gartner, showing or estimating the value of AI is a major barrier to its adoption for almost half of companies.
Concourse will also need to allay potential customers’ fears about AI-introduced errors and hallucinations. In a survey of UK-based executives by HR specialist Peninsula, 40% said inaccuracies in AI tools were a top concern, followed by concerns about data privacy.
Hafemeister said Concourse uses “a variety of tools and techniques” for fact checking and validation to ensure its AI performs tasks as intended. He added that Concourse doesn’t use company data to train its AI models — at least not without explicit permission — and that the platform only collects data that customers share with it.
“Data accuracy is paramount in finance, where answers are typically either completely correct or completely incorrect,” Hafemeister said. “As such, we at Concourse have spent a lot of time and effort delivering AI that can accurately perform its assigned task. We also take data privacy and security very seriously and have built Concourse using industry best practices.
People seem ready to take Hafemeister at his word.
Concourse, which is still in beta ahead of a wider launch planned for next year, has several customers, including Instabase And Shefand $4.7 million in capital. Hafemeister’s former employer, a16z, invested in the startup, alongside Y Combinator, CRV and BoxGroup.
Hafemeister says the current focus is on product development and growing Concourse’s six-person staff, based in New York.
“We’ve raised money to hire more engineers, build more workflows that our AI can support, increase coverage of data integrations, and start expanding our go-to-market function,” he said. -he declared. “The focus on engineering hiring is hiring backend, machine learning, and AI engineers.”