Stratify, a venture-backed start-up focused on bringing a collaborative and connected approach to strategic finance, today announced it has closed a $4.9 million Series Seed investment to transform financial planning and analysis by tackling one of the most important elements of managing any company - the budgeting process.
The investment round was led by Madrona Venture Group with participation from Coatue.
Founded by former Docker CFO, Brian Camposano, Stratify is ushering in a new era of finance tools by providing a real-time and collaborative budgeting and forecasting solution that enables companies to execute a continuous planning model. The Stratify platform provides a single view for key stakeholders to align, plan and monitor actual financial and operational performance relative to budget assumptions. The company is helping finance organizations move to a more collaborative budgeting process by connecting operational data sources and the teams that drive company revenue and spend with a company’s budget, and leveraging machine learning to identify performance gaps, quantify financial impacts, and create revised forecast scenarios. The result is a continuous budgeting process that engages key stakeholders across the business and enables organizations to adapt to real-time, real-world operational impacts such as the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Budgeting is central to how any company manages its business, however legacy budgeting solutions are not built to support real-time, collaborative dynamics. Businesses today have access to mountains of critical operational data that could have immediate impact on revenue and profitability but they are using old solutions that are outdated, expensive to implement, disconnected, and do not support collaborative engagement. As a result, finance teams waste time performing countless manual and administrative tasks and conducting analysis using stale data. At Stratify, we have developed our solution alongside CFOs and their teams who want a budgeting solution that engages and aligns their leadership team in a budgeting process that’s fast, accurate, and actionable. That’s what Stratify is built to do,” stated Brian Camposano, CEO and Founder of Stratify. Prior to Docker, Camposano spent many years in senior leadership roles at SAP, Concur, and Deutsche Bank.
“Intelligent applications are the future of enterprise software, and no area is more ripe for this work than the office of the CFO,” commented Steve Singh, managing director, Madrona Venture Group. “Companies delivering intelligent applications to solve mission critical business problems -- companies like Clari, VNDLY, Center, and Stratify -- will replace the legacy vendors over the next decade. The process of creating, measuring and updating a budget should be continuous, collaborative and connected, not the current system of manual work that is often based on complex and breakable spreadsheets. Brian and I have both felt the pain of this in our past lives, and I’m excited to really dig in and work with the team to solve this problem.” Singh serves as the Executive Chairman of Stratify’s board.
Stratify was incubated at Madrona Venture Labs with their team of experienced founders and operators who have a strong history of partnering with founders, from day one, to build data-driven machine learning applications that solve critical business problems. Stratify is working with charter customers in the finance and technology industries and is actively hiring.