Today, we are thrilled to announce leading Tesorio’s $10m Series A funding round. As a career CFO, I am always looking for ways to automate the back office and to apply modern technologies, such as ML/AI and RPA to the office of the CFO. When you are managing a company that is growing quickly, it is imperative that processes scale and do not break as the organization changes. That is why I was excited when I met Tesorio and saw a practical application of new algorithms and technology in a space that I have been involved in my entire professional life.
Throughout my career at both private and public companies I was constantly frustrated by how many important analyses happen in a bespoke excel spreadsheet. In today’s modern era, it is amazing how many crucial decisions are made, key conclusions are formed and key metrics are created with spreadsheets that are on the brink of breaking – too many links, formulas, dependencies and worksheets!
The ultimate financial metric for a company is Cash. Not just the current balance, but the trajectory of the balance. In the vast majority of companies this analysis is performed on a spreadsheet. One containing many links, often circular references, and pulling in data from multiple sources. The risk of an error, a break, is high. Equally importantly, a spreadsheet is not exactly a living, breathing thing even though we might pretend otherwise. Changes to data sitting in different silos do not flow easily into spreadsheets without complex processes and significant human involvement.
When I met the Tesorio team, it was exciting to be able to quickly dive into a product that was replacing the spreadsheet and adding an intelligent layer to the cash flow forecasting process. By pulling actual transactions from back-office systems, adding ML/AI to that history and allowing the user to add in unique transactions, the system uses a 3-part process to generate a cash flow.
In addition, Tesorio enables their clients to impact and improve their cash flow. The building blocks of cash flow – the inputs and outputs–are addressed in the Tesorio offering. Their AR Automation offers the ability to streamline the collection of AR (Accounts Receivables) by understanding when customers typically pay, automating customer contact to speed payment, and delivering a dashboard for finance teams to manage the workflow and communication that is core to successful collections. The same is true with the management of AP (Accounts Payable) and the forecasting and planning of hedging strategies. The result of all these areas is that much of the Finance and Accounting teams spend their day in the Tesorio application – all ultimately feeding the cash flow forecast.
The founding team, Carlos Vega and Fabio Fleitas together bring a unique combination of technical and financial expertise. They partnered together at UPenn, where Carlos was studying analytics at Wharton after spending nearly a decade in finance, and Fabio was studying computer science in the School of Engineering where he founded PennApps Fellows. Together they have brought to market a product that has already been adopted and used by an impressive list of companies including Veeva Systems, Box, WP Engine, Instructure, and Couchbase.
Finally, Tesorio squarely fits our Intelligent Applications thesis that we at Madrona have been focused on for several years. As we have discussed here, we expect intelligent applications to disrupt every business process by collecting data across different silos and applying ML/AI to that data to extract unique insights, automate workflows and even obliterate obsolete processes in some instances. In Tesorio, we believe we have finally found a product that provides the CFO and her team unique insights into the business and optimizes its finances like never possible before.