Even without a background in accounting, anyone who has ever glanced at a 10-K or 10-Q can tell that preparing financial statements is a complex, tedious process.
While legacy platforms like Workiva and Donnelley Financial Solutions aim to streamline financial reporting, longtime accountants Mary Antony (pictured right) and Kelsey Gootnick (pictured center) found themselves exhausted by various manual hurdles within these tools (co-founder and CTO Jared Tibshraeny is pictured left).
The duo met seven years ago at Flexport, where Gootnick served as the company’s controller and Antony served as assistant controller. They stayed in touch even after Antony moved to Miro and Gootnick to Hopin and later Thrive Global.
No matter where they worked, Antony and Gootnick kept running into the same manual challenges.
“The way financial statements come together, it’s just patched together in a lot of spreadsheets, moved into a bunch of Word documents, emailed back and forth between people,” Antony told TechCrunch.
So, in 2023, the pair decided to launch InScope, an AI-powered financial reporting platform that helps companies and accounting firms automate many aspects of the financial statement preparation process. The startup just raised $14.5 million in Series A funding led by Norwest, with participation from Storm Ventures and existing backers Better Tomorrow Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
While InScope isn’t fully automating the generation of income statements and balance sheets yet, it automates a vast amount of the manual busy work, from verifying math to formatting. Simply ensuring that dollar signs and commas are uniform and correctly placed can save accountants up to 20% of their time, according to Antony, InScope’s CEO.
Over the last 12 months, InScope has grown its customer base by 5x, attracting significant accounting firms such as CohnReznick, currently ranked in the top 15 nationally.
Of course, it may be a while before accountants — a profession Antony describes as risk-averse — feel comfortable letting AI fully automate financial statement preparation. Nonetheless, that remains InScope’s ultimate goal.
Norwest partner Sean Jacobsohn told TechCrunch that he invested in InScope after he heard from multiple clients that the startup’s product saves them a lot of time.
Jacobsohn is convinced that InScope stands out because few founders possess the specific expertise required to reinvent financial reporting technology.
“It’s a very complex space, and you need to be able to have been in the shoes of the buyer before,” he said.
Antony agrees that accountants are not typically the type to launch startups. Fortunately, she and Gootnick developed their entrepreneurial instincts through years of operating within the fast-paced cultures of other high-growth startups.