Minority founded business brings new AI-driven platform to market that plans, manages, and predicts cash flow and finances for SMBs
CHICAGO, IL / ACCESSWIRE / April 4, 2022 / Clockwork, the leading financial planning and analysis platform (FP&A) for growing businesses and their advisors, announced today that it has closed a $2 million seed round investment from Underscore VC in Boston.
The Clockwork SaaS platform alleviates the pain founding teams experience wrangling the complexity of finances and forecasts while running fast-growing businesses. 89 percent of the more than six million employers in the U.S. have fewer than 20 employees, and the vast majority of these businesses lack a full-time finance person or someone focused on FP&A. These businesses typically hire outsourced CFOs or rely on their CPAs to receive the strategic advice they need to grow instead of owning that process themselves.
To take the friction out of finances for everyone, Clockwork integrates with Quickbooks Online and Xero in less than five minutes and saves teams 20 or more hours a month on managing, planning, and predicting their finances and cash flow. The platform uses machine learning to ingest up to three years of financial data and then learns from historical trends, seasonality, and other traits to build detailed models and forecasts. Teams can create unique five-year projections, 52-week cash flow forecasts, and dashboards, and run unlimited custom assumptions and scenarios in seconds instead of days or weeks.
Founded by a Black former banker and an Arab fractional CFO, the Clockwork team lived the pain small businesses have managing their finances and cash flow every day; they constantly fielded ad-hoc calls from entrepreneurs who didn't grasp finances or needed to make critical hiring decisions or were struggling to show potential investors how their businesses were doing. According to a recent U.S. Bank study, 82 percent of businesses fail because of cash flow problems. This is exacerbated by poor visibility into business finances or a lack of financial literacy. Clockwork affordably simplifies finances and gives founding teams power over their numbers with tools to make necessary information easy, accessible, and immediate.
"We take the mystery out of finance and give business operators confidence in their numbers and cash flow to empower their growth," said Fady Hawatmeh, CEO and founder, Clockwork.ai. "The single best piece of information as a fractional CFO I used to give clients was 'know your numbers.' Having financial command reduces fear, allows management teams to take calculated risks, and focuses them on what they do best to grow their businesses instead of relying on someone else, or spending valuable time wrangling spreadsheets."
Clockwork's market opportunity is significant: it solves a consistent problem for almost eight million US-based businesses that currently run on Quickbooks Online or Xero. The platform empowers outsourced professionals and internal teams alike require no hand-holding to implement, is easy to use, and costs a fraction of other FP&A platforms. The Clockwork team is also actively assisting other company founders through their Startup and Inclusion Program. This innovative initiative helps any company making less than $1MM in revenue and/or are founded/led by black, brown, women, disabled, or any other minority with discounted tools and support. The program's goal is to offset the disparity in venture capital investing, as minority-run companies receive less than three percent of VC funding (Crunchbase).
"Underscore's mission of working with vertically oriented SaaS businesses is well represented in Clockwork. Fady and his co-founder, Mike Webb and their team have found and solved for a critical need in a big and underserved market: helping small businesses and their finance partners take control of their finances with tools that previously were only available to growth-stage companies," said Brian Devaney, principal, Underscore VC. "The Clockwork team has also lived the pain they are solving with the product, which gives them an acute understanding of what their clients need, and a proven ability to execute."
About Clockwork.ai
Clockwork is the first-ever FP&A platform entrepreneurs, VCs, and CPA firms love to use. Clockwork's award-winning intelligent platform creates AI-powered 5-year financial projections, 52-week cash flow forecasts, dashboards, and scenario planning in literal seconds. Users have the ability to customize assumptions with one click for driver-based forecasting while Clockwork keeps financials up-to-date in real-time by integration with QuickBooks Online and Xero (Sage Intacct coming soon). For more information about Clockwork and its intelligent, all-in-one FP&A platform contact hello@clockwork.ai, follow us on Instagram @clockwork.ai, or visit us at www.Clockwork.ai.
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SOURCE: Clockwork
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