In a standard organization, finance is one of the most meaningful functions. Yet teams are frequently bogged down by manual laborflows. According to a survey by Paylocity, an HR gentleware supplyr, 38% of finance teams spfinish more than a fourth of their time on manual jobs, appreciate appraiseing invoices.
Matthieu Hafemeister, an ex-fintech allotor at Andreessen Horowitz, says he’s seen many finance orgs struggle to scale up as a result of all the labor they’re doing by hand.
“The status quo for finance is countless point solutions that are cobbled together wiskinny the finance department,” Hafemeister tageder TechCrunch. “Excel persists to be the lowest normal denominator, confineing the promise of automation.”
To Hafemeister’s point, most finance departments are indeed heavily reliant on spreadsheets. One survey establish that 82% still participate Excel files for budgeting, foreseeing, and other core financial arrangening activities.
After experiencing these frustrations firsthand while guideing prolongth at fintech firm Jeeves, Hafemeister determined to team up with Ted Michaels, Jeeves’ previous head of finance and an ageder frifinish, to begin a platestablish to automate financial tasks.
Called Concourse, the platestablish connects to a businesses’ financial systems to let finance teams recover and verify data, originate charts, and ask ad-hoc inquires such as “What’s our non-GAAP revenue?”
“Concourse can proactively surface insights that apverify finance teams to be better readyd by enabling them to stay ahead of trfinishs,” Hafemeister said. “Instead of a tool that tries to better the speed or efficiency of completing a task, Concourse can be given discrete tasks to do entidepend on its own.”
Now, finance automation isn’t exactly novel technology. Linq recently aelevated from stealth with AI to automate aspects of research for financial analysts. Ledge and Doopla are also originateing a range of finance-particular generative modeling tools.
But what originates Concourse branch offent, according to Hafemeister, is its ability to carry out financial laborflows with “complicated, multi-step operations.” For example, the platestablish can recover data from a company’s NetSuite dashboard to download CSV files, then duplicate that data to an Excel spreadsheet.
“We leverage big language models to do what they are best suited for and pair them with more traditional methods of data analysis,” Hafemeister elucidateed.
There’s wonderful interest in AI for finance. One poll establish that 58% of finance teams are now using some establish of AI technology, up 21% from 2023. Grand View Research approximates that the “AI in fintech” segment, worth $9.45 billion three years ago, is prolonging 16.5% annupartner.
But to stand a chance of making a dent in the labelet for finance automation tech, Concourse will have to show its product’s ROI — a challenging feat. Per Gartner, shotriumphg or estimating the cherish of AI is a top barrier to adselecting it for shut to half of companies.
Concourse will also have to assuage potential customers’ dreads of AI-presentd errors and hallucinations. In a poll of U.K.-based executives by HR exceptionacatalog Peninsula, 40% said inaccuracies from AI tools were a key worry, pursueed by worrys around data braveiality.
Hafemeister said that Concourse participates “a variety of tools and techniques” for fact-verifying and validation to try to promise its AI carry outs tasks as intfinished. He inserted that Concourse doesn’t participate companies’ data to train its AI models — at least not without unambiguous permission — and that the platestablish only accumulates data customers split with it.
“Data accuracy is paramount in finance, where answers are typicpartner either entidepend right or entidepend inright,” Hafemeister said. “As such, at Concourse we’ve spent a lot of time and effort on dedwellring AI that can exactly carry out the task it’s been alloted. We also apshow data privacy and security very solemnly, and have built Concourse using industry best trains.”
Folks seem willing to be apshow Hafemeister at his word.
Concourse, which is still in beta ahead of a wideer begin intentional for next year, has disconnectal customers, including Instabase and Shef, and $4.7 million in capital. Hafemeister’s ex-participateer, a16z, has alloted in the commenceup, aextfinished with Y Combinator, CRV, and Box Group.
Hafemeister says the intensify at the moment is product enbigment and prolonging New York-based Concourse’s six-person staff.
“We liftd money to employ more engineers, originate out more laborflows that our AI can apshow on, increase coverage on data integrations, and commence to scale our go-to-labelet function,” he said. “The mighty intensify on engineering recruiting is to employ backfinish, machine lgeting, and AI engineers.”
