CFOs are the alleged omniscient owners of a company. While the CEO defines the strategy, messages and builds the culture, the CFO needs to know everything that is going on in an organization. Where does the revenue come from and when will it arrive? How much will the new staff cost and when will these expenses have to be paid? How can cash flows be managed and which debt products could help eliminate any discontinuity?
As businesses migrated to the cloud, these questions have become more difficult to answer as other departments have begun to avoid ERP as a centralized registration system. Worse still, CFOs are expected to be more strategic than ever when it comes to finance, but they may struggle to deliver important forecasts and projections given the lack of key data. CMOs have gotten a whole new software stack to manage marketing over the past decade, so why not CFOs?
For three Palantir alumni, the hope is that CFOs will turn to their new startup called Mosaic. Mosaic is a "strategic financial platform" designed to capture data from all kinds of systems in the alphabet soup of corporate IT - ERP, HRIS, CRM, etc. - and therefore provide CFOs and their teams with strategic planning tools to be able to predict and forecast more accurately and quickly.
The company was founded in April 2019 by Bijan Moallemi, Brian Campbell and Joe Garafalo, who have worked together with Palantir in the company's finance team for more than 15 years. While they were there, they watched the company grow from a small organization with just over a hundred people to an organization with thousands of employees, more than a hundred customers as we saw last year with the Palantir IPO and revenue. entry from more than a dozen countries.
Strategic finance management was critical to Palantir's success, but the existing tools in its stack couldn't keep up with the company's needs. So Palantir ended up building his own. "We weren't just working in Excel, which is really the default tool in the CFO toolkit, but we were actually building a technical team that wrote code, [and] building tools to truly deliver speed, access, trust and visibility to the entire organization, "described Moallemi, who is CEO of Mosaic.
Most organizations can't spare their technical talent at the CFO's office, and just as the three co-founders left Palantir for other pastures as finance managers - Moallemi at the edtech startup Piazza, Campbell at the litigation management startup. Everlaw and Garafalo at blockchain startup Axoni - continued to filter on how to improve finance. They came together to do for all companies what they saw in Palantir: build a great software foundation for the CFO office. "Probably the biggest advancement for the CFO's office over the past 10 years has been the shift from a sort of desktop-based Excel to cloud-based Google Sheets," said Moallemi.
So what is Mosaic trying to do to rebuild the CFO software stack? He wants to build a platform that is a gateway to connecting the entire company to discuss finance in a more collaborative way. So while Mosaic focuses on reporting and planning, the pillars of the finance department, they want to open those dashboards and forecasts more broadly within the company so that more people can get a feel for what's going on and also provide feedback to the CFO.
There are a handful of companies like publicly traded Anaplan that have entered this space in the past decade. Moallemi says incumbents have a couple of key challenges that Mosaic hopes to overcome. The first is onboarding, which can take months for some of these companies as consultants integrate software into a company's workflow. The second is that these tools often require full-time dedicated staff to stay operational. The third is that these tools are basically not visible to anyone outside the CFO's office. Mosaic wants to be ready for immediate integration, widely distributed within organizations, and requires minimal maintenance to be useful.
"Everyone wants to be strategic, but it's so hard to do because 80% of your time is extracting data from these disparate systems, cleaning it, mapping it, updating your Excel files and maybe 20% [your time] it's actually taking a step back and figuring out what the data is telling you, "Moallemi said.
This is perhaps why its target customers are Series B and Series C funded companies, which no doubt have much of their data already in easily accessible databases. The company started with smaller companies and, Moallemi said, "Over the past 12 months or so we have been working slowly with larger and more complex clients." The company has grown to 30 employees and has seven-figure revenue (without a sales organization, according to Moallemi), although the startup didn't want to be more specific.
With all that growth and enthusiasm, the company is grabbing the attention of investors. Today, the company announced it has raised $ 18.5 million in Series A funding led by General Catalyst's Trevor Oelschig, who has led other corporate SaaS deals at startups like Fivetran, Contentful and Loom. That round ended late last year.
Mosaic previously raised an initial investment of $ 2.5 million led by XYZ Ventures' Ross Fubini in mid-2019, who was previously an investor at Village Global. Fubini said via email that he was intrigued by the company because the founders had a "shared pain" in Palantir about the state of the software for CFOs and "they had all experienced this deep frustration with the tools they needed to do their. work".
Other investors in Series A included Felicis Ventures, in addition to XYZ and Village Global.
Along with the funding, the company also announced the creation of an advisory board that includes current or former CFOs of nine technology companies, including Palantir, Dropbox and Shopify.
Many business functions have undergone a complete transformation in software. Now, Mosaic hopes, it's time for the CFO.
