Operational fintech platform Abacum raises $25M
Financial planning and analysis are oftentimes synonymous with spiraling into spreadsheet madness, a lot of repetitive and error-prone manual tasks. Yet, financial planning and analysis can unlock so many benefits if you do it smartly – you can get very valuable insights into where your company is standing at the moment, explore the data and make forecasts for your next step.
Since it includes different systems and different people in your company, you have a recipe for a potential disaster. So is there a way that will unify everyone into one unique business ecosystem that will make everything work toward one common goal? That is where Abacum takes the spotlight. Abacum is a cloud-based financial planning and analysis platform, built with collaboration and remote work in mind.
How can Abacum help you understand your data assets better?
With Abacum, companies can streamline their processes. It has numerous pre-built connectors that can work with systems such as Gusto, Google Sheets, Salesforce, or Netsuite. Instead of replacing them all – Abacum ruled them all. You can synchronize all your operational data from one and centralized location and generate table views and useful insights.
What makes Abacum unique is that it ignites and facilitates communication between different parties involved in operational data. You can leave comments, tag people, and set reminders. You can also create spaces where the different departments can discuss the data which is important for their workspace.
This year we’ve witnessed various new financial planning and analysis emerging on the market such as Cube Software, Pigment, or DataRails. Also, there are many great legacy players such as Hyperion or Anaplan.
Abacum owners claim that these systems are not adaptive enough and often oversaturated with some unimportant functionalities. Market and technologies are evolving fast and they simply can’t catch up and meet the client’s needs.
The pandemic sped things up and it was an eye-opening experience for many companies that realized just how important precise forecasting is.
“Proper financial modeling and scenario planning needs to be at the forefront of all forecasting and business strategies. This really resonates with our target audience where, in the tech space, there is a lot of uncertainty in the market, and they need to always be prepared for any and all situations,” said Abacum owner Julio Martinez.
Fintech and operational fintech
For many people, today fintech is synonymous with new payment solutions and modern banking but the term operational fintech means something different. For a long time, it was in the shadows and caused financial experts to remain stuck in the good old ways with spreadsheets. But operational fintech is finally taking off.
“These [legacy approaches] are great, but none of them answer the needs and pains of scaling finance teams,” he said. “And so, this space is ripe for disruption, and many founders have seen that FP&A has so much potential to be a value driver.”
So far, Abacum has raised around $7 million. They are backed up by Atomico, and they’ve received investments from Creandum, S16VC, and FJ Labs as well. Since April, Abacum has been growing tremendously. They currently have two offices – one in NYC and one in Barcelona. The number of employees had jumped from 15 to 70.
The future of operational fintech seems bright, finally, we can get some rest of all these Excel formulas.
