— Building the modern FinOps platform for finance teams!
Today we are thrilled to announce our investment in Bluecopa- a connected Financial Operations platform assisting CFOs and Finance leaders make strategic data-driven decisions in a hassle-free, real-time manner.
Our journey with Bluecopa started back in early 2022 when we started forming a strong conviction on the need of fluid data stacks and observability across processes. There were a lot of excited whispers around Satya, Neel, & Raghava and what they were building in stealth at the time, all credit to the high amount of credibility and background they come from. Following which we connected with Satya to understand what they are building and why, and since then, there has never been a conversation in which the team did not fascinate us exponentially.
If you have had the chance to work as or with the finance teams, you would realise the pain they go through to make sense of the momentous influx of data across multiple data sources, in a rather manual, ad-hoc and hence tedious and repetitive process. There are spreadsheets with manual entries, mails, calls, async communications, data warehouses, fragmented point solutions, all requiring extreme data entry and number crunching at multiple points of time. And then, there is the need to manage data in real-time and collaborate with it across silos as the function of finance is time-critical and across teams in the very nature. More so, in the current environment, where it is absolutely critical for businesses to have high quality real time visibility into their financial & strategic data in one-single view.
A median 1.2 percent of revenue is spent by companies across the globe on the finance function. 70% of this work can be automated. — McKinsey
While there are legacy tools, including the likes of Excel- the mammoth data rarely reconciles, and quite often calculating even the simplest metrics becomes hard as they are not build exclusively for modern day CFOs. And, while the role of the CFO has become highly strategic across the globe, finance tools have not scaled proportionally- as this is a core data engineering problem at heart. This is where Satya, Neel, and Raghav come in with Bluecopa.
As always, our investment thesis around any startup is powered around its founders. In the case of Bluecopa, the founders have an amazing relationship and founder-market-fit for the problem statement! Their great relationship stems from the days when they build and sold Optotax together- market leader in GST filing and reporting for Tax Practitioners in India, which later got acquired by Open in 2021. Satya before that also co-founded Tuplejump, similar to Snowflake, which ended up being Apple’s first acquisition in India.
The magic does not stop here, the perfect mix of experiences they bring to this problem statement drives their ambition to solve it. Satya comes from an extensive experience of building data infrastructural solutions and has spent years at Apple’s backend infrastructure & BI team (out of Cupertino) post Tuplejump, followed by which Optotax and Open happened. Neel on the other hand, has had a 15+ years long career in sales across Ramco, Netcracker and Open and has also attended ISB-Hyderabad. Having led enterprise sales teams across multiple geographies, he comes from a solid background of building and executing sales-led GTM motions from India across the globe. Raghava here is the subject matter expert of the team and manages all things ops. He is a finance professional by background, also attended ISB-Hyderabad and therefore, has first hand experience in FP&A & complex finance operations- the problem Bluecopa is looking to solve.
Bluecopa’s detail-oriented and user-research backed approach is a driving wedge. They are, in simpler terms, creating a spreadsheet-like interface. All possible data sources like CRM, Datalakes, BI, ERP, so on and so forth will be integrated here, with a real-time data flow (even and more for large volumes), in an easy to use interface for all financial operations by the likes of CFOs. Any financial function like Compliance, Planning a & Budgeting, FP&A, etc., can then be carried from one single platform in an easy & intuitive manner; powered by AI, templates, tailor-made features, specifically for finance teams. Therefore, it is a heavy data engineering problem and requires nuanced understanding of the space. The early traction that they have speaks for the quality of the product in itself.
The $2.3Mn round was led by Blume Ventures, and also saw participation from other VCs and marquee angels and will be used for product building with close design partners, getting real usage feedback from customers and getting to early PMF.
We are very fortunate to have had a chance to partner with Bluecopa and and support them in their vision to build the connected FinOps platform for enterprises all across the world.
Check them out here for early access!
Onwards & Upwards! 🚀