Exclusive: ‘Colleague AI’ for CFO Startup Just Raised $8.7M Seed Round Led by General Catalyst

The startup is the brainchild of its three founders – CEO Ron Nachum, CTO Pranav Ravella and chief scientist Arya Grayeli – who raised funding from lead investor General Catalyst and other research companies. venture capital and angel investors.

Sapien describes its service as a native AI system built from the ground up that integrates with Excel, enterprise resource planning systems, and customer relationship management systems. The autonomous colleague breaks down and analyzes queries submitted by finance professionals, and the user can question every assumption made by Sapien as they learn more about the organization with each interaction, according to Nachum.

“We found that the financial director’s pileFP&A (financial planning and analysis), in particular, is in great need,” Grayeli said. Fortune.

Some examples? For healthcare companies, Sapien can assess revenue and visit trends across hundreds of clinics to provide actionable growth recommendations, Nachum said. And for manufacturing companies, it can analyze a year’s worth of raw transaction data across dozens of factories to uncover key impacts and reduce more than 100 hours of manual work to five minutes of supervision from an AI colleague, the company said. ‘business.

Sapien is already being rolled out to CFOs at some manufacturing, services and software companies, Nachum said. For one manufacturer, it took a week each month to conduct an attribution analysis, during which it analyzed a year’s worth of transaction-level data to understand which customers and products had the most impact, a- he explained. Sapien therefore contacted the company to test its autonomous employee.

“Sapien did the analysis in a matter of minutes and actually detected an error of almost $10 million in the way they were doing business on the day of their board meeting,” Nachum said. “We told them we think it’s not true. And that led to one of our first six-figure contracts.

Building on trust

Grayeli, Nachum and Ravella, all 20 years old, have been friends since they attended high school in Northern Virginia, where they excelled academically. Grayeli’s father is an investment advisor, and he and his father often talk about monotonous financial processes that should be automated. Grayeli always kept this in mind when he developed an interest in machine learning and the development of intelligence and was even pursuing a doctorate. course as an undergraduate.

Nachum went on to attend Harvard, Ravella chose Stanford, and Grayeli became a student at the University of Texas at Austin. The trio had college friends who were studying business and spent all their time fiddling with Excel or pulling data from different places, Grayeli said. This is how they decided to focus on a project centered around AI and finance.

It is well known that surviving in the world of startups is not an easy task. Challenges tend to occur early in the life of a startup, when the people running it are still in trial and error mode. Abandoning prestigious universities to concentrate on this adventure was not something that the three friends took lightly.

“I learned a lot at Stanford, but I also wanted to create products,” Ravella said. He, Nachum, and Grayeli were at a crossroads where they chose to forgo academia for the opportunity to forge their own paths. And a little advice from them: it’s crucial when building a startup to do it with people you trust completely.

“It’s an incredibly cool idea with the best people I know,” Ravella said. “They’re as crazy as me,” he joked.

Managing Director Niko Bonatsos and General Catalyst Partner Max Rimpel led the operation. Neo, a venture capital and early-stage startup accelerator, contributed significantly to the fundraising. Other high-profile angel investors include Bryan Baum of K5 Ventures; Russell Kaplan, president of Cognition; Claire Hughes Johnson, business executive and advisor at Stripe; Sabrina Hahn of the SH Fund; and Scott Belsky, founder of Behance and chief strategy officer at Adobe.

CFOs have become essential business strategy. As the role of CFOs has changed over the years, it now “places the entire CFO group at an inflection point ripe for disruption,” said Ken Chenault, former chairman and CEO of American Express and Chairman and CEO of General Finance. Catalyst said in a statement. “In our view, Sapien is producing the cutting edge of AI research for CFOs, with the opportunity to truly revolutionize how finance teams operate,” he said.