Funding Alert

ZenStatement Raises $1.62 Million in Seed Round

• ByStartupStory     |    October 10, 2024

ZenStatement, an AI-powered finance automation and cashflow management platform, has successfully raised $1.62 million in a Seed Round led by 3one4 Capital and Boldcap VC, with participation from Dynamis Ventures and Atrium Angels. The funding round also saw support from prominent angels and business leaders, including Michael Boyd (ex-Global Treasury Head, Apple), Chetan Venugopal (Founder, Pierien Services), Ankit Nagori (Founder, EatFit), Kulin Shah (Founder, Onsurity), Ankit Fatehpuria (Founder, Zetwerk), Sujayath and Navaneeth (Founders, Shop-up, Voonik).

Founded in 2023 by Sourabh Nolkha and Ankit Narsaria, ZenStatement (formerly SimpliFin) aims to address the challenges that finance teams face due to disconnected systems and manual, repetitive tasks referred to as ‘the CFO Stack.’ The platform provides enterprises with high transaction volumes an AI-powered solution for financial analytics and cashflow management. ZenStatement enables businesses to monitor, optimize, reconcile, and forecast cash flows, while offering valuable insights through AI-driven natural language queries.

In just 12 months of operation, ZenStatement has built an impressive customer base that includes unicorns and major businesses in digital commerce, retail (F&B and others), and fintech sectors, handling approximately 10 million transactions (about USD 60M) per month. With the new seed funding, ZenStatement will expand its product offerings and invest in building a sales and marketing engine to grow its presence both in India and international markets.

Addressing Finance Automation Challenges

Today’s fast-paced digital world has led to increased transaction volumes and financial complexities, overwhelming finance teams with manual work like consolidating data on Excel sheets, generating financial reports, and managing cash flows. Many organizations, regardless of size, sector, or geography, struggle with cashflow leakages and inefficiencies due to underfunded finance functions. ZenStatement’s AI-driven platform simplifies these processes, helping businesses automate financial workflows and improve cash flow management.

Announcing the fundraise, Sourabh Nolkha, CEO & Co-founder of ZenStatement, said, “By automating the finance processes end-to-end, we help finance teams to be more productive and focus more on activities that drive more impact. We have seen great traction so far in India (and there are early offshoots in other developed markets) and looking forward to accelerating the digital adoption of the finance function while simplifying the lives of finance professionals.”

Co-founder and Chief Product Officer Ankit Narsaria added, “With the support of our investors, we will accelerate our growth and enhance our offerings through the world’s first unified finance automation platform that not only meets the needs of our users today but also adapts to the future demands in the ever-evolving financial landscape. Our focus is on delivering a user-friendly platform that truly meets the needs of finance teams. With our AI-powered features, we’re making it easier for businesses to automate financial processes, gain real-time insights, and make informed decisions.”

Investor Support and Market Opportunity

The seed funding has drawn strong interest from investors who recognize the growing need for automation in finance functions. Commenting on the investment, Sonal Saldanha, Vice President, Investments at 3one4 Capital, said, “Reconciliation is a surprisingly hard problem to solve and businesses often tend to put some brittle solutions in place for the lack of viable alternatives, and a great starting point for a product like ZenStatement. Sourabh and Ankit bring domain knowledge and customer empathy to a crucial business function and have already made a mark in the one year that they’ve been around. We are excited to support ZenStatement as they scale and drive impact in the industry.”

Sathya Nellore Sampat, General Partner, Boldcap VC, echoed these sentiments, adding, “We initially assumed reconciliation is a solved problem, but quickly learnt at most mid to large organizations it’s still manual, inaccurate and delayed. Additionally, organizations currently experience a loss of approximately 2-3% of their revenue solely due to cash flow leakages, with potential losses being even greater as a result of workflow inefficiencies. Every CFO wants to solve all of this actively. Sourabh and Ankit, have collectively solved these problems in the past and are now using their expertise to build a one-stop CFO-stack to simplify finance functions for mid to large businesses. We are very excited to back them.”

According to a recent Gartner survey, over 59% of business finance functions report several errors per month, largely due to increased workloads and inadequate financial technology solutions. ZenStatement’s approach to solving these persistent challenges positions it as a promising leader in finance automation.

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