In a typical organization, finance is one of the most highly valued functions. However, teams get stuck in low-value, manual workflows. According to Paylocity, an HR software provider, 38% of finance teams spend over a quarter of their time on manual jobs-things like reviewing invoices.

Matthieu Hafemeister, a former fintech investor at Andreessen Horowitz, commented how many finance orgs face issues in scale because of all the manual work they must put in.

"The status quo for finance is thousands of point solutions cobbled together within the finance department," Hafemeister told TechCrunch. "Excel remains the lowest common denominator, constraining the promise of automation."

And, of course, to Hafemeister's point, most finance departments are indeed still hopelessly dependent on spreadsheets. One survey noted, for example, that 82% of respondents were still using Excel files to manage budgets and forecasts, core financial planning activities.

Following those experiences up close through leading growth at fintech firm Jeeves, Hafemeister teamed up with Ted Michaels, Jeeves' former head of finance and an old friend, to build a platform that would automate these tasks.

Called Concourse, the product links into a firm's financial systems to enable finance teams to access and analyze data, create charts, or pose ad hoc questions such as "What's our non-GAAP revenue?

"Concourse can proactively surface insights that make finance teams better prepared by letting them stay ahead of trends," said Hafemeister. "Rather than a tool that simply tries to speed up or make a task more efficient to complete, Concourse can be given discrete tasks to do entirely on its own."

Finance automation isn't exactly a newfangled technology, but Linq recently emerged from stealth with AI to automate aspects of research for financial analysts. Ledge and Doopla are also building a line of finance-specific generative modeling tools.

But what really makes Concourse unique, said Hafemeister, is its capacity for running financial workflows with "complex, multi-step operations." For example, the platform can automatically pull data from a company's dashboard in NetSuite and then download CSV files to fill an Excel spreadsheet.
"That is, we use large language models to do what they are best suited for and then pair those with more traditional methods of data analysis," Hafemeister explained.

Finance is seeing a lot of interest in AI. In fact, 58% of finance teams already use at least one form of AI technology, showing a 21% jump from 2023. In the last three years, the "AI in fintech" segment, valued at $9.45 billion, grew annually at an estimated 16.5%.

But if it's going to make some dent in the market for finance automation tech, Concourse is going to have to show that its product can bring in ROI-a difficult nut to crack. According to Gartner, showing or estimating the value of AI is a top barrier to adopting it for close to half of companies.

Concourse will also have to comfort the fears of potential customers over AI-introduced errors and hallucinations. According to a poll of UK-based executives by HR specialist Peninsula, 40% of them said that inaccuracies from AI tools were their greatest worry, followed by worries around data confidentiality.

Hafemeister said that for "fact-checking and validation," Concourse uses "a variety of tools and techniques" to try to make sure its AI "operates as intended." He said Concourse doesn't use companies' data to train its AI models — at least not without explicit permission — and that the platform only gathers data customers share with it.

Data accuracy is paramount in finance - answers are usually either fully correct or fully incorrect, Hafemeister said. "Consequently, at Concourse we've spent a lot of time and effort delivering AI that can accurately perform the task it's been assigned. We also take data privacy and security very seriously, and have built Concourse using industry best practices."

So far so good, folks seem ready to take Hafemeister at his word.

Concourse, which is still in beta ahead of a broader launch planned for next year, has several customers, including Instabase and Shef, and $4.7 million in capital. Hafemeister's ex-employer, a16z, has invested in the startup, along with Y Combinator, CRV, and Box Group.
Hafemeister says the focus at the moment is product development and growing New York-based Concourse's six-person staff.

He added that the company raises money to hire more engineers, build out more workflows that its AI could take on, raise coverage on data integrations, and start to scale its go-to-market function. "The strong focus on engineering recruiting is hiring backend, machine learning, and AI engineers," he added.