Our investment in Abacum: empowering finance teams to make organisations thrive
The software revolution has upended business models, built new industries, hamstrung others and changed the face of almost every aspect of working for (and with) any company on the planet. From content creation to coordination, increasing productivity to fostering collaboration, every aspect of business has been transformed. But there is always an exception that proves the rule: finance teams are yet to be provided with a specialist solution that enables them to integrate multiple data sources and collaborate with teams across an organisation.
All businesses depend on effective planning. And effective planning can only be achieved by a finance team operating at its best. To build a robust business plan, finance teams need to pull financial information and operational metrics from right across the firm. Every department has different needs, and utilises different solutions tailor made for their part of the business. This leads to a huge amount of manual tasks for finance teams such as downloading CSV files, copying and pasting in spreadsheets, and performing manual data transformations prone to human error. And because teams use a raft of different tools, ‘collaboration’ between them and the central finance function sees finance teams chasing other functions through Slack, email, Zoom or even comments in Google Sheets.
That’s why we are today pleased to announce that we have partnered with Jorge, Julio, and the rest of the team at Barcelona-based Abacum to help them empower finance teams to make organisations thrive through better decisions and faster execution. We are delighted to announce the closure of a $25M Series A round that brings Abacum’s total funding to $32M, which will enable Abacum to consolidate its position as the leading financial planning and analysis (FP&A) company.
Integrating data sources between teams and the financial planning function is core to enabling businesses to develop an effective commercial roadmap. But accessing data – from a highly curated CRM to an expansive data warehouse – presents a major challenge for finance teams performing the operation by hand. By some accounts, the process of cleaning the data alone can take up to 70 per cent of time allocated to business planning. Abacum’s solution automates this process on an end-to-end basis, providing rich insights without the need for manual work.
Abacum provides a simple interface that enables finance teams to share only the information they need to with any given team, allowing both to work collaboratively in a shared space to drive efficiency and minimise miscommunication. And by automating the integration of multiple data sources – and empowering finance teams to seamlessly assess the results of this process – Abacum draws a line under existing solutions that have not been built with the user in mind.
The Abacum team has grown to over 65 globally across 16 nationalities and already works with an array of fast growth technology companies. But this is just the beginning. In the context of a shifting business environment, finance teams face the need to do more sophisticated forecasting and scenario planning than ever before – and we believe that Jorge and Julio will build the tool that enables them to do just that.
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