In a typical organization, finance is one of the essential functions. However, teams often get bogged down by manual workflows. According to a Opinion poll According to Paylocity, an HR software provider, 38% of finance teams spend greater than 1 / 4 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 due to all of the manual labor they do.
“The establishment in finance consists of countless point solutions cobbled together inside the finance department,” Hafemeister told TechCrunch. “Excel continues to be the bottom common denominator and limits the promise of automation.”
According to Hafemeister, most finance departments actually rely heavily on spreadsheets. One Opinion poll found that 82% still use Excel files for budgeting, forecasting and other essential financial planning activities.
After experiencing these frustrations firsthand while leading the expansion of fintech company Jeeves, Hafemeister decided to team up with Ted Michaels, Jeeves' former chief financial officer and an old friend, to launch a platform to automate financial tasks .
Called hallThe platform connects to an organization's financial systems, allowing finance teams to access and analyze data, create charts, and ask ad hoc questions similar to “What is our non-GAAP revenue?”
“Concourse can proactively provide insights that enable finance teams to be higher prepared by staying ahead of trends,” said Hafemeister. “Instead of a tool that tries to enhance the speed or efficiency of completing a task, Concourse will be given discrete tasks that it completes completely independently.”
Now, financial automation isn’t exactly a brand new technology. Linq recently got here out of stealth using AI to automate elements of research for financial analysts. Ledge and Doopla also develop a variety of finance-specific generative modeling tools.
But what sets Concourse apart, in line with Hafemeister, is its ability to run financial operations with “complex, multi-step operations.” For example, the platform can pull data from an organization's NetSuite dashboard to download CSV files after which copy that data into an Excel spreadsheet.
“We use large language models to do what they’re best suited to and mix them with more traditional methods of information evaluation,” explained Hafemeister.
There is great interest in AI in finance. One A survey found that 58% of finance teams now use some type of AI technology, a 21% increase from 2023. Grand View Research Estimates that the AI in Fintech segment, valued at $9.45 billion three years ago, is growing at 16.5% annually.
But to have a likelihood of breaking into the financial automation technology market, Concourse must show ROI on its product — a difficult feat. Per According to Gartner, demonstrating or estimating the worth of AI is the most important barrier to adoption for nearly half of firms.
Concourse also must allay potential customers' fears of AI-related errors and hallucinations. In one Opinion poll 40% of UK-based executives at HR specialist Peninsula said inaccuracies attributable to AI tools were a top concern, followed by concerns about data confidentiality.
Hafemeister said Concourse uses “a wide range of fact-checking and validation tools and techniques” to make sure its AI performs tasks as intended. He added that Concourse doesn’t use firms' data to coach its AI models – not less than not without explicit permission – and that the platform only collects data that customers share with it.
“Data accuracy is paramount in finance since the answers are frequently either completely right or completely flawed,” said Hafemeister. “Therefore, at Concourse we’ve spent loads of effort and time to deliver AI that may accurately perform the duty assigned to it. We also take privacy and security very seriously and have built Concourse using industry best practices.”
People seem willing to take Hafemeister at his word.
Concourse, which continues to be in beta before launching more broadly next yr, has several customers, including Instabase and Shef, and $4.7 million in capital. Hafemeister's former employer a16z invested within the startup together with Y Combinator, CRV and Box Group.
According to Hafemeister, the present focus is on product development and expanding the six-person workforce at New York-based Concourse.
“We have raised money to rent more engineers, develop more workflows that our AI can handle, increase coverage of information integrations and begin scaling our go-to-market function,” he said. “The strong focus in engineering recruiting is on hiring backend, machine learning and AI engineers.”
