Many years ago, before I founded Leapfin, I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to work with some really incredible people at Zynga. Zynga, while a gaming company on the surface, is actually a data company at its core. We pioneered some of the best practices in product management that are now common knowledge today. When we launched a new game to the market, we could generally tell whether the game would become a blockbuster success, or a complete flop, all within 30 days.
I was part of the Business Operations organization – we were the COO’s right hand and cross-functional partners with all of the game studios. We drove the most critical business decisions including revenue planning, headcount allocation, marketing budgets, CapEx, and more. In a company that was so data driven with every product metric at its fingertips, we, ironically, felt like outsiders.
My boss would ask me a simple question – what’s the ROI if we add $5M in ad spend to Poker Mobile next quarter? To answer, I’d ask my data analyst to help pull a bunch of Tableau reports and my financial analyst to pull a bunch of reports from our Oracle ERP. After 2 weeks of Excel magic, I’d have the answer – by that time, my boss had already forgotten what the analysis was even for.
This manual process really got me thinking – how could a company as advanced as Zynga in product analytics lack the same level of agility with its most important data – financial data – that ultimately drives key business decisions?
The “aha” moment is when I realized ERP solutions like Oracle and NetSuite are no longer the system of record for financial data for modern businesses, but rather a system of record for summarized month-end journal entries. ERPs really only capture a snapshot in time of how the business is performing in the form of financial statements.
Besides not having the agility to answer executive questions on-demand, there are numerous problems that arise from this status quo:
It became clear that ERPs need a powerful supplement to support the needs of modern businesses. The data, the computation, and the analytics that are needed to compute these journal entries are often sitting in tens, sometimes hundreds, of different systems and Excel spreadsheets, that aren often managed by an army of accountants and financial analysts.
All of these problems are rooted in the same core issue: there’s no longer a source of truth for financial data.
The core belief behind Leapfin is in order to solve Finance’s problems, we must solve the problem at its core.
If we capture financial data at its most granular form from all relevant sources, and automatically translate them into GAAP compliant financial events, at massive scale, then we can empower all the stakeholders with the information they need to do their jobs better.
This simple idea also supercharges the entire financial technology ecosystem. When the right level of financial information is extracted or inputted in the right systems, at the right time, for the purposes they are designed for – the entire ecosystem wins. ERPs can serve their end users better with accurate and timely financial reporting, BI tools can serve their end users better with clean data the entire organization can trust, and planning tools can empower FP&A with agile planning cycles.
Many of our customers rely on Leapfin today for real-time financial visibility, including Canva, Reddit, SeatGeek, Guideline, Vimeo, Altitude Sports, and many others. Our customers are leaders of their respective industries, and we are very honored that they entrust us with such mission critical parts of their business
Erik and I founded Leapfin with the singular mission to liberate financial information to empower businesses to make and trust their decisions.
Today, we are thrilled to announce we’ve raised a $12.2M Series A led by Crosslink Capital with participation from Uncorrelated and Work-Bench.
The new funding will allow us to accelerate our mission to liberate financial information to empower businesses to make and trust their decisions.
With the new funding, we plan to:
To our customers – we’ve been very fortunate to partner with some of the most incredible leading companies today. We will never take your trust for granted and we will continue to make your lives easier, so you will always have confidence in your GAAP financials and trust your strategic decisions.
Onwards,
Ray