Exclusive: An 'AI coworker' for CFOs startup just raised a $8.7 million seed round led by General Catalyst | Fortune

Sapien, a platform to create “autonomous coworkers” for finance professionals, officially launched on Tuesday. The founders announced an $8.7 million seed fund for the startup, which touts its ability to use AI to dive into company financials and tackle complex, days-long workflows in just minutes. Sapien likens its tools to “AI coworkers” who work alongside finance teams.

The startup is the brainchild of its three founders—CEO Ron Nachum, CTO Pranav Ravella and chief scientist Arya Grayeli—who raised the money from lead investor General Catalyst and from other venture capital firms and angel investors.

Sapien describes its service as an AI-native system built from the ground up that integrates with Excel, enterprise resource planning systems, and customer relationship management systems. The autonomous coworker breaks down and analyzes queries submitted by finance professionals, and the user can challenge every assumption Sapien makes as it learns more about the organization with each interaction, according to Nachum.

“We found that the CFO stack, FP&A [financial planning and analysis], specifically, has such a great need for it,” Grayeli told Fortune.

Some examples? For health care companies, Sapien can evaluate revenue and visit trends across hundreds of clinics to provide actionable growth recommendations, Nachum said. And for manufacturing corporations, it can analyze a year’s worth of raw transaction data across dozens of plants to uncover key impacts, and reduce over 100 hours of manual work to five minutes of supervising the AI coworker, the company said.

Sapien is already deployed with CFOs at some manufacturing, services, and software businesses, Nachum said. For one manufacturer, it took a week each month to do an attribution analysis, where they would dig through a year’s worth of transaction-level data to understand which customers and products were most impactful, he explained. So Sapien approached the company to sample its autonomous coworker.

“Sapien did the analysis in minutes—and actually caught a near-$10 million-dollar error in how they were doing this on the day of their board meeting,” Nachum said. “We told them, we think this is wrong. And that led to one of our first six-figure contracts.”

Grayeli, Nachum, and Ravella, all 20 years old, have been friends since attending high school in Northern Virginia where they excelled academically. Grayeli’s father is an investment advisor, and he and his dad would often talk about the monotonous finance processes that should be automated. Grayeli always kept that in mind as he developed an interest in machine learning and building intelligence and was even taking Ph.D. courses as an undergrad.

Nachum went on to attend Harvard, Ravella chose Stanford and Grayeli became a student at the University of Texas at Austin. The trio had college friends who were business majors spending all their time doing Excel manipulations or pulling data from different places, Grayeli said. That’s how they decided to focus on a project centered around AI and finance.

It’s well known that surviving in the world of startups is no small feat. Challenges tend to happen early in a startup’s life when the people who run it are still in trial-and-error mode. So dropping out of prestigious universities to focus on this venture wasn’t something the three friends took lightly.

“I did learn a lot at Stanford, but I also wanted to build products,” Ravella said. He, Nachum, and Grayeli were at a crossroads where they chose to forgo academia for an opportunity to forge their own paths. And a bit of advice from them— it’s crucial when creating a startup to do it with people you wholeheartedly trust.

“It’s an insanely cool idea with the best people that I know,” Ravella said. “They’re also just as crazy as me,” he quipped.Niko Bonatsos, managing director, and Max Rimpel, partner of General Catalyst led the deal. Neo, an early-stage VC and startup accelerator, was a significant contributor to the fundraise. Additional top angels include Bryan Baum of K5 Ventures; Russell Kaplan, president at Cognition; Claire Hughes Johnson, corporate officer and advisor at Stripe; Sabrina Hahn of SH Fund; and Scott Belsky, Behance founder and chief strategy officer at Adobe.

CFOs have become central to company strategy. As the role of chief financial officers has changed over the years, it now “puts the entire CFO stack at an inflection point that’s ripe for disruption,” Ken Chenault, the former chairman and CEO of American Express, and chairman and managing director of General Catalyst said in a statement. “In our view, Sapien is productizing the cutting edge of AI research for CFOs, with the opportunity to truly revolutionize how finance teams operate,” he said.