As cloud-based software becomes the norm for many functions within modern businesses, data silos are becoming a huge problem. This is particularly true in the financial industry, where providers are often faced with reconciling data from a wide range of sources.
According to a 2022 tech-executives-top-priority-for-2022/”>survey From InterSystems, which, it should be noted, has a horse in the data reconciliation race, given that it is a data technology provider, 62% of financial leaders say that improving access to distributed and isolated data will be one of their main initiatives in the next 12 months. Fifty-four percent cited data silos as one of their biggest barriers to innovation.
Albert Gozzi boldly states that his company, Alephhave the solution – or to solution, rather. Aleph enables finance and operations teams to centralize their financial data from disparate systems, including enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management platforms, and bring it directly into their spreadsheets with permissions and version control.
“After years of working as a startup CFO and consultant at Bain, I became increasingly frustrated with the tools available to finance professionals,” Gozzi told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Everything was old and clunky, or trying to get you out of Excel and learning arbitrary new syntax. On top of that, the data I needed for my models was scattered across the source systems. “I saw a gap in the market and set out to fill it.”
Gozzi built the MVP for Aleph in 2020. In 2021, he was joined by his co-founder, Santiago Pérez De Rosso. Shortly after, the duo was accepted into Y Combinator and signed their first client.
At a high level, Aleph, which comes in cloud versions, web app, and add-ins for Excel and Google Sheets, makes software for financial planning and analysis. With Aleph, customers can consolidate data from accounting systems, human resources information systems, applicant tracking systems, and more, schedule automatic data extractions, and save versions of financial models in Aleph to maintain a single source of truth.
Aleph can track changes to incoming financial data, allowing customers to choose the level of data they want to share and tap version history to review any changes to saved financial models. Gozzi says companies most frequently use the platform for month-end reporting tasks, investor communications and variance analysis.
“When you get to a certain point, you need a more robust tool that gives you instant access to your accounting data and helps you run your models faster and more effectively,” Gozzi said. “Aleph believes that the best finance professionals don’t need guidance or structure for their models: they need flexibility and power. That’s why we keep our users on Excel and Sheets, but give them all the benefits of a central database with all their financial data instantly accessible.”
Aleph claims to have found early success with brands like Turo, Envoy, Zapier and Postscript and about 40 others. It is currently growing at a rate of around 10% to 15% month over month, Gozzi says, despite the broader economic slowdown.
That doesn’t mean that Aleph is no competitors in the market for financial analysis and planning tools; btw, a market of ~$3.7 billion as of 2022, according to devise information about data. Gozzi rattled off who he considers his main rivals, including incumbents like Anaplan and Adaptive; “non-Excel” software such as Mosaic, Pigment, OnPlan and Casual; and “Excel-based” solutions such as Cube and DataRails.
It’s a big cohort. But Gozzi maintains that Aleph’s technical superiority is (and will continue to) win over potential customers.
“Aleph can be set up with integrations in less than ten minutes and requires very little, if any, training,” he said. “On top of that, it feels much more fluid and modern from a usability perspective and provides the most flexibility given its data model.
Maybe that’s true. It will correspond to Aleph, however, to move customers away from multi-solution, multi-software setups. A 2021 survey from Advisor Software found that nearly 80% of financial advisors use one or more, probably more, financial planning apps or services, an increase of nearly 14% from the previous year. In the absence of consolidation, Aleph faces an uphill battle to convince users to rely exclusively on its product.
Aleph, which announced today that it raised $16.7 million in a funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures with participation from Khosla Ventures, Picus Capital and Y Combinator, plans to grow its workforce from 13 people to 20 by the end of the year . Gozzi described Aleph’s track as “very healthy” and the burn rate as “low” – a healthy place for a startup, for sure.