Stratify came out of stealth mode and announced a $4.9 million seed investment round led by Madrona Venture Group.
The company, which started in Seattle but is now fully remote, spun out of Madrona Venture Labs (MVL), the Seattle startup studio backed by Madrona. GeekWire previously reported on the company this past May.
Stratify is led by Brian Camposano, the former CFO at Docker who was an entrepreneur-in-residence at MVL since March. He previously spent 12 years at Deutsche Bank and nearly four years at Concur, the travel expense giant that sold to SAP for $8.3 billion in 2014.
The startup aims to automate the budgeting and forecasting process, replacing legacy software used by various types of companies. It allows for collaboration across various departments and enables a real-time “continuous planning model.” Machine learning is used to identify performance gaps and create revised forecast scenarios.
The idea is to help finance professionals save time on manual and administrative tasks, freeing them up to dig into the numbers and identify key trends.
“Continuous budgeting is an important evolution of the traditional budgeting workflow, as it leverages access to real-time data in order to analyze financial and operational performance in real-time, compare those results to the underlying budget assumptions, address any identified operational issues to optimize performance, and re-forecast the business when business dynamics have changed,” explained Camposano.
Stratify natively integrates with a customers’ core systems of record and can automatically create reports and calculate KPIs based on the financial and operational performance of the business, Camposano said.
Steve Singh is chairman at Stratify. He and Camposano have crossed paths multiple times. Singh helped start Concur back in 1993 and led the company until 2017, before joining Docker as CEO in May 2017. Camposano arrived at the software startup a few months later.
Singh joined Madrona Venture Group, which created MVL, as managing director this past January.
“Intelligent applications are the future of enterprise software and no area is more ripe for this work than the office of the CFO,” Singh said in a statement. “The process of creating, measuring and updating a budget should be continuous, not the current system of heads down work that is often based on complex and breakable spreadsheets.”
Stratify has five employees, including Brian Torrey, a former Adaptive Insights exec, and Venky Krishnan, who was previously at Apptio and Microsoft. The company plans to triple the size of its team over the next year.
Camposano said the pandemic and economic crisis have not negatively affected Stratify. He said the current situation has “highlighted the importance of a tool like Stratify.”
“In particular, the ability to quickly and automatically create new forecast scenarios that reflect changing business dynamics, and our collaboration capabilities that allow distributed management teams to access consistent data sets quickly and easily to ensure all stakeholders are operating with the same understanding of the state of the business,” he said.
Coatue, which announced a $700 million early-stage fund last year, also participated in Stratify’s seed round.
Madrona has made an effort to invest in fintech companies and expand Seattle as a fintech hub.
Other recent MVL spinouts include Zeitworks, led by Seattle startup veterans Ryan Windham and Ben Elowitz, and Simplata, a data security startup led former BMW ReachNow CEO Steve Banfield and former Domain Tools CTO Bruce Roberts.
Source: Geek Wire
