Accountants typically fear month-end or quarter-end financial results. This is because the final creation of financial records for a specific period is typically manual, error-prone, and time-consuming.
In 2020, Parker Gilbert (pictured above, center), fed up with the tedium of managing finance and accounting at an early-stage startup, decided to co-found Numeric, an accounting software that automates certain parts of the closing process. I made it. process. A few years later, the introduction of genAI greatly enhanced Numeric's capabilities, and it is now used by accounting departments at companies like Brex, OpenAI, Plaid, and Wealthfront.
Last year, Numeric's revenue quadrupled to single-digit millions of dollars, and investors suddenly started flocking to back the company. Just five months after raising $10 million in a seed round from a number of prominent investors, the company has raised $28 million in a Series A led by Menlo Ventures, with participation from new investors IVP and Socii. . Previous backers Founders Fund, Long Journey, 8VC, Friends & Family Capital, and Fifth Down also invested in the round.
By using Numeric, accounting teams can shave days off their monthly close process, Gilbert told TechCrunch. The company's product accomplishes this by aggregating and reconciling data from various accounting systems and Excel spreadsheets. Then overlay that data with an AI agent to see how each item has changed from the previous month. If an agent discovers outliers or unexpected fluctuations, it explains why an account increased or decreased, saving accountants a lot of time documenting account variances. This is a process known as flux analysis.
Gilbert, the startup's CEO, gave an example. If the AI agent noticed that Numeric's legal costs were much higher in October than in September, it would write an explanation like this: You paid Wilson Sonsini an additional $X for funding. ”
The possibility of AI hallucinations in flux analysis commentary is one of the first concerns that comes to mind, but Gilbert emphasized that it is usually not a problem. Numeric said it always provides a link so accountants can check the AI agent's work at any time.
Although the actual combinations and calculations are not currently being done by the generative AI, Gilbert expects Numeric's models to be able to do it accurately soon. “In terms of synthesizing large amounts of data, LLM is very good at this today and I think it will continue to get better and better,” he added.
Croom Beatty, a partner at Menlo Ventures, spends a lot of time looking for companies that disrupt accounting software, and says Numeric was one of the first startups in the space that piqued his interest. spoke.
“Numeric's moat is much deeper than many areas we were exploring,” he said. “It brings together complex workflows and complex data in a market that is underserved by technology companies.”
Beatty expects the company to be able to add other products in the future, such as financial planning and analytics capabilities. Anaplan currently dominates this market.
Numeric competes with two accounting software companies: publicly traded Blackline and FloQast, an 11-year-old startup valued at $1.6 billion when it raised a Series E in April of this year. Masu.
As for why there aren't other new AI-powered entrants in the accounting software market, Beatty said what Numeric is doing is very complex and cannot be easily replicated.