When Leapfin When founder and CEO Ray Lau led financial operations at the game company Zynga ten years ago, he saw how difficult it was for his team to get quick answers about the company’s financial health. He attributed this to too much data in silos and rigid financial systems.
He says data has shown that even today, most CFOs feel their financial systems are not flexible enough. A year after he left Zynga in 2014, he launched Leapfin to solve this problem. Today, his company announced a $12 million Series A.
“In a nutshell, Leapfin is a financial data management solution. I think the quick way to think about what we’re doing is we’re helping CFOs scale their finance and accounting organizations non-linearly,” Lau said. What he means is using APIs to connect to several systems of data that are important to the finance team.His software can bring data together faster and more efficiently than the hodgepodge of systems has previously allowed.
He says the typical financial system can include 100 different back office systems. This results in a mountain of data points, which could be interesting and useful to the financial experts if they could bring it all together. But the problem is, it’s hard to get this data in real time because it can really have a positive impact on the business.
“We’re basically bringing all this siled data into a single intelligent repository. And there is a lot of intelligence and logic behind it. We translate all silo data into real-time financial data,” explains Lau.
He added: “But the most important thing is that we don’t just take that data in; we make sense out of data. So we connect the dots across all the different systems and apply business logic and rules and basically translate it into GAAP finance that CFOs and accounting teams can trust.”
He says a number of things separate his business from more general data analytics tools. First, it is completely focused on financial data and the needs of financial professionals. Second, they use a graphical database as they piece this data together to help the teams see connections between the data points they might otherwise have missed.
While the company launched in 2015, Lau says it took some time to build a product that could deliver on its vision. Companies using his software today include Canva, Vimeo, Reddit, and Flexport.
He believes that a product like this can thrive even in an economically lesser environment. “We are a little lucky that we have not been affected by this recession and inflationary environment. I think mostly because we’re a very mission-critical product and we benefit from a CFO whether it’s a bull market or a bear market,” he said.
The company currently employs 50 people and as it grows, he believes that working completely remotely will help build a diverse organization. “We currently have employees in 12 different countries. And we also believe that the best way to improve diversity is to actually increase diversity in the candidate pool at the top of the funnel, which is something that is top of mind and something that we really focus on,” he said. .
Investors in the $12 million Series A include Crosslink Capital, Work-Bench and Uncorrelated, along with industry angels.