Abacum, the financial planning and analysis (FP&A) technology company, today announces the closure of a $25M Series A round that brings its total funding to $32M. The round was led by Atomico, with participation from Creandum, FJ Labs, S16VC (the fund backed by the founders of UiPath, Miro, Zenjob, Hopin and Intercom), and other existing investors. In addition, a number of notable unicorn founders and executives are joining this round as angels including Adyen CFO Ingo Uytdehaage, Infarm CFO Carmine Visconti, JobandTalent co-founders Felipe Navío and Juan Urdiales, and Blockfi founder Zac Prince. As part of this investment, Atomico Principal Terese Hougaard will join Abacum’s board.
Founded in 2019 by Julio Martínez and Jorge Lluch, Abacum was created to simplify the FP&A process for scaling companies in verticals such as SaaS, fintech, marketplaces and mobility. Now trusted by fast-growing companies such as Typeform, Cabify and Ebury, Abacum has grown rapidly throughout the pandemic - providing an important lifeline to finance departments needing to effectively budget and forecast through the significant change many businesses saw from 2020 onwards.
Collaboration between finance functions and teams across organisations is fundamentally broken: it is a relationship typified by copying and pasting in spreadsheets and performing manual data transformations prone to human error. With no shared platform between these parties, too often finance teams spend their time chasing other functions via Slack, email, Zoom or even comments in Google Sheets.
“Tech companies are extremely quick to throw resources at sales and marketing (understandably) but so many of the CFOs and finance leaders we talk to are suffering from a lack of resources - in spite of the record-breaking amount of cash raised in the past few years. This means that so often they are bogged down in admin, rather than providing the strategic insight expected of them,” reflected Julio Martínez, CEO & Co-Founder, who previously spent 15 years working in finance.
To solve these problems, the Abacum is built on three core tenets that empower finance teams and those that work with them to perform at their best: automation, collaboration, and insights. Whether from a CRM or a data warehouse, accessing and finding the right data presents a major challenge for finance teams with the process of cleaning data alone taking up to 70% of time. Abacum’s solution automates this process end-to-end, providing relevant insights without the need for a “manual marathon”.
“Modern finance teams are increasingly called upon as the central source of truth in a company, providing all other teams with the input they need to make key strategic decisions. The uncertainties presented by the pandemic have exacerbated this, with finance teams needing to accurately forecast and scenario plan faster than ever before,” saidAtomico Principal Terese Hougaard. “Abacum provides the platform strategic finance teams need to do exactly this: aggregate and combine existing sources of business data, forecast, plan and - crucially - collaborate with all other teams in a company.”
Having experienced hyper growth in the past year, Abacum has saved approximately 1,348 hours of their clients time in the FP&A process, a milestone which Jorge Lluch (co-founder and COO) is proud of - having lived the challenges as CFO and COO at scale ups such as Travelperk, Wallapop and Privalia first-hand. Lluch highlighted: “Abacum is built for finance professionals, by finance professionals, and we’re passionate about continuing to promote this philosophy in both our go-to-market and product teams as we continue to ramp up hiring. This is critical to ensure we know the pains our customers are facing intrinsically - and this round will enable us to deliver them painkillers faster.”
However, Abacum is for all teams within an organisation as much as it is for the central finance function. It 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 remove the chance of miscommunication.
The Abacum team has grown from 15 people at seed to now over 70 globally across 16 nationalities, with expertise recruited from AWS, N26, Mixpanel, BCG, Travelperk and Microsoft.
Julio Martínez continued to look ahead, stating: “2022 is going to be a very exciting year for Abacum. We feel extremely confident that the support we’ll receive from our new partners at Atomico (alongside our existing investors) will enable us to continue delighting our existing clients and bring even more value in the financial planning process. Our goal is to make finance teams heroes for other departments - and the journey has only just begun.”
By continuing to build its product, Abacum will enable any mid-market company in the world to build a highly productive finance function that partners seamlessly with all the stakeholders in a business.
About Abacum
Founded in 2020 by Jorge Lluch and Julio Martinez, New York-based Abacum aims to empower finance teams to make organisations thrive through better decisions and faster execution. The Abacum team has grown to over 65 globally across 16 nationalities and works with some of the most exciting fast growth technology companies including unicorns Cabify, Typeform, and many more. Chief Operating Officer Jorge Lluch is a former COO at business travel company TravelPerk and the former CFO at Accell-backed classified ads app Wallapop. Chief Executive Officer Julio Martinez was previously the co-founder and CEO at Innocells (Banco Sabadell’s fintech arm) and a former investment banker at Citigroup in the US, Switzerland, and Brasil.
About Atomico
Atomico invests in ambitious tech founders at Series A and beyond with a particular focus on Europe, leveraging deep operational experience to supercharge their growth. Founded in 2006, Atomico has partnered with over 100 ambitious teams - including those at Klarna, Supercell, Graphcore, Compass, MessageBird, Masterclass, Attentive Mobile, Pipedrive and Hinge Health. Atomico's team of founders, investors and operational leaders have been responsible for global expansion, hiring and marketing at companies from Skype and Google to Twitter and Uber. The firm currently has $4.7B in assets under management.
cloud technology axon
Wellk es una startup guipuzcoana que nació hace tres años, que cuent...
