A New Platform for Strategic CFOs

“Iron Male suit” for the modern-day CFO. A “strategic finance” platform. A rebuild of the CFO software program stack. Mosaic, a new software program platform from the company of the exact identify, has acquired some impressive labels.

What’s distinct is that it is a single of the extra attention-grabbing pieces of software program to occur along for finance chiefs in a though. It has a whole lot to dwell up to, but it is also arriving at the appropriate time. A report launched by Panorama Consulting this week uncovered that of 112 executives surveyed in the center of 2020, 21% were being dissatisfied with their business useful resource arranging (ERP) process implementations, and 34% were being just neutral about them. 

Mosaic’s option arrives just as ERP methods, in the eyes of some, are “unbundling.” The increase of cloud-centered applications like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Rippling has manufactured existence simpler for revenue and advertising and marketing, human sources, even authorized departments and “made them extra strong at their work,” suggests Bijan Moallemi, the CEO of Mosaic.

These products have usurped the ERP from its posture at the “center of the constellation for individuals in the finance business.” Now, at numerous businesses, the ERP is just an additional device in the tech stack.

It also may be getting to be outdated. In Moallemi’s perspective, ERP methods are way too siloed to permit finance to connect with other sections of the business and CFOs to fulfill their strategic remit.

To be a strategic CFO, “it’s not fantastic more than enough to just have variety of area knowledge more than the facts coming into your ERP process,” Moallemi suggests. “You will need to have mastery more than all the distinct business methods that the business is applying.”

Other apps, like monetary arranging and assessment applications, are highly niche, and though they have to have whole-time persons to maintain, “only a compact part of your finance group is applying them.” In addition, nonfinance personnel “are not shelling out time inside these platforms.”

So, finance, which is responsible for all the facts these methods produce, “is nonetheless caught in Excel,” Moallemi suggests.

Finance teams are usually pulling down distinct datasets from methods, scrubbing that facts, mapping that facts throughout methods, and presenting it to the business by using notepads, Slack messages, e-mail, PDFs, and so forth. 

Enter Mosaic. CEO Moallemi and his two co-founders — Brian Campbell and Joe Garafalo — achieved at Palantir Technologies in 2012 though scaling the finance purpose at a company that grew from one hundred fifty personnel to a single with 3,000-furthermore throughout the world.

The 3 experienced all the trials that finance departments of developing corporations are likely to experience: way too a great deal handbook perform in Excel, prolonged implementation cycles for extra complex software program, and way too numerous disconnected, cloud-centered applications. They founded Mosaic in April 2019.

The Mosaic platform aims to give finance with a “connective, collaborative” atmosphere. It is built to get facts mechanically from all sorts of methods in the business — ERPs, HRISs, CRMs, billing and payments methods, and others.

Pushing serious-time facts again out to business leaders is carried out within the exact device. Mosaic provides info in a way that is digestible to nonfinance persons. Instead of a statement of cash flows or a equilibrium sheet, they get quick-to-use dashboards, facts visualizations, and automated insights. The platform also incorporates synthetic intelligence and equipment learning to help in forecasting versions of the long run.

The outcome? A shared set of truths for decision-earning. And no extra arguments at the get started of arranging conferences more than the integrity of the facts. “Strategic finance goes from being a solitary-player match with it’s possible the finance and the C-suite to a little something that will involve the overall business,” says Moallemi.

Mosaic can get clients stood up on its option in two to 3 times, suggests Moallemi, contrary to legacy methods where the experienced companies piece and time to value is on the order of months.

In mid-January, the company landed an $eighteen.five million Collection A funding round led by General Catalyst with participation from Felicis Ventures, Village Global, and XYZ Ventures. 

To enable steer solution enhancement, the company has assembled an impressive listing of CFOs to be on its board of advisers, which includes Ron Gill, the former CFO of Netsuite Russ Jones, the former CFO of Shopify Ken Goldman and Ajay Vashee, the former CFO of Dropbox.

Sums up Moallemi: “We really truly feel like there’s an possibility to build a really crucial company inside of this place that alterations the way that strategic finance occurs inside businesses, no matter whether they’re a 10-human being startup or a community company.”

ERP, Excel, Mosaic, strategic CFO