After years of working for startups, including Limeade and Zephyr Health, Martin Zych came to realize that companies were lacking an automated, cloud-based way to run their books and prop up their financial models. Most were stuck with legacy tools with siloed, clunky architectures that made it impossible — or close to impossible — to measure and plan for changes in a holistic way.
“As a business grows, there are more factors that you need to consider when planning for the future,” Zych told TechCrunch in an email interview. “The breaking point for me came after a company I was working for finally had a large enough budget to spend on a financial planning and analysis (FP&A) solution. It cost us nearly $100,000, and took six months to implement and get to parity with our existing Excel model. I knew there needed to be a faster and more cost-effective solution for finance professionals.”
Zych’s solution was Jirav, a platform he built with longtime business partner Steve Turner. Jirav offers a library of prebuilt FP&A solutions for specific industries, including financial models, KPIs, reports and dashboards.
In a sign investors believe in the mission, Jirav today closed a $20 million Series B round led by Cota Capital with participation from Born Capital, Alumni Ventures, Information Venture Partners and Bluefish Ventures. The funding, which brings Jirav’s total raised to $33 million, will be put toward product development, customer acquisition and talent recruitment, Zych said.
“This fundraise is part of our long-term strategic plan,” he added. “It allows us to invest in key areas of growth, ensuring we are well-positioned for success as the economy rebounds. By raising funds now, we can continue our growth trajectory and product development to continue innovating in the space.”
Jirav offers an array of tools aimed at financial planning use cases, including models for forecasting profits and losses and cash flows. Once companies connect their accounting, workforce and operational data to the platform, they can create budgets and scenario plans to analyze changes in their business.
“Companies need robust financial planning and analysis tools both in a hot market as well as a down economy. In fact, they may need them even more to navigate uncertainties and optimize resources,” Zych said. “As a leading provider of these solutions, Jirav is well-positioned to serve this market demand.”
“Leading provider” might be a bit of an exaggeration, given the sheer size of the FP&A software market.
Jirav has a rival in Cube, which offers tools to help finance teams plan their financial futures. (Cube, like Jirav, is well-funded, having raised over $45 million to date.) There’s also Firmbase, a startup that provides a modern financial planning and analysis platform for startups; Vereto, which is attempting to reinvent financial planning workflows for large organizations; and Mosaic, a startup building a platform that attempts to centralize operational data from across an organization.
Allied Market Research estimates that the global market for FP&A software will reach $16.9 billion by 2031, up from $3.7 billion in 2021.
For its part, San Francisco-based Jirav, which has a 70-person team, claims to have a customer base of more than 4,000 companies. Zych wouldn’t reveal revenue figures, but described them as “strong.” We’ll have to take his word for it.
“We have had record growth each of the past few quarters, and continue to add hundreds of new companies onto the platform every month,” Zych said. “The financial planning space has seen innovation come forth with vendors like Datarails and Mosaic, as well as so-called traditional players like NetSuite and Workday Adaptive Planning. Jirav does compete with these vendors, but has also built a completely differentiated product that stands out in how it serves accounting firms.”
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