The finance department at Typeform, a company that makes software that helps customers create forms, had a problem.
Whenever a manager in another department of the fast-growing startup in Barcelona requested information on the company’s financial performance, the finance department had to pull that information from a half-dozen different systems—one for enterprise resource planning, another for customer relationship management, another for business intelligence—and assemble them into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that it would then email to the business manager.
“You would spend so much time just putting the figures together that when you need to actually analyze the data, you run out of time,” said Xavier Castellana, Typeform’s chief financial officer.
That’s when Castellana met the Barcelona-based founders of another startup, called Abacum, who had designed software to help finance departments more easily compile data, share it with others, and work collaboratively on a single platform.
Based on the same sort of “notebook-style” interface found in software such as Notion, a project management platform, or Jupyter Notebooks, which developers use to share documents that contain live software code, Abacum allows a user to simply create charts and tables, and perform data analytics and forecasts, by automatically pulling live data from a variety of business “systems of record.” It is integrated with some 150 different databases and software programs.
Typeform became an early Abacum customer. “The best thing has been the collaboration part,” Castellana said. Now, business executives are able to see in real time how they are performing against their budget, and they can have more substantive discussions with the finance team, he said.
Abacum, founded in 2019, now has more than 50 customers, mostly mid-market businesses and fast-growing startups, according to Julio Martinez, the company’s cofounder and chief executive officer. Today the company, which is officially headquartered in New York, announced that it has raised $25 million in venture capital funding to further its growth.
The funding round was led by Atomico, the European venture capital fund founded by billionaire and former Skype cofounder Niklas Zennström. Venture capital firms Creandum and S16VC, a venture fund whose investors include the founders of a number of successful European startups, including UiPath and Hopin, as well as a number of prominent angel investors also participated in the funding round. The latest investment brings to $32 million the total amount Abacum has raised to date, the company said.
Among the individuals backing Abacum is Ingo Uytdehaage, the chief financial officer at Adyen, the payments company that has become one of Europe’s biggest fintech success stories, now valued at more than $80 billion.
“I have seen how hard it is to build a finance function that is really giving insights to the business and not just closing the books,” Uytdehaage told Coins2Day. He said he met the cofounders of Abacum through a network of European tech founders run by Atomico. When he saw a demonstration of their product, he decided to invest in his personal capacity, he said.
“If there would have been software like Abacum in our early days at Adyen it wouldn’t have taken so long to build the finance function to where it was really helping everyone drive insights,” he said.
Martinez said that Abacum would use the money it has raised in the latest investment round to expand both its sales and marketing teams, as well as to continue building out its engineering and product staff. The business currently employs about 75 people, mostly in Europe, although some employees are in New York, he said. The company has also been accepted into the winter 2021 cohort at Y Combinator, the famed San Francisco–based startup accelerator program.
Correction, Nov. 30: A previous version of this story wrongly identified Atomico as an early backer of Adyen.
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