Dive Brief:

• U.K.-headquartered financial forecasting startup Ramp announced the closing of a $5 million seed funding round led by investment firms AlbionVC and Eurazeo.

• The funding will help with hiring additional staff and onboarding new clients, according to Daniel Marcus, the startup’s CEO and co-founder.

• “It’s been a long journey,” Marcus said in an interview. “We kind of bootstrapped for the first four years.” 

Dive Insight:

Ramp, which has clients in both Europe and the U.S., provides software designed to help finance teams quickly perform tasks such as revenue growth projections. 

Marcus said the company’s clients have typically used spreadsheets in the past to perform financial forecasts, which can be a time-consuming process. With that method, a company might “start a forecast in the beginning of the quarter and finish it at the end,” he said. “We allow them to do that in two to three minutes. Once their data is in the tool, they can output what they want to see.”

The company announced the seed funding closure in a press release on Friday. 

Finance professionals are increasingly turning to technology to help them with doing their jobs more quickly and effectively. 

In a survey released on Feb. 14 by business advisory firm FTI Consulting, 51% of finance leaders said their role required an increased focus on technology implementation in 2022. Forty-four percent of respondents said they expected to focus more on technology implementation over the next 18 months.

Ramp’s forecasting platform relies on “cohort-based forecasting,” a technique used to extrapolate the behavior of different groups of customers for a product or service from the moment they sign up.

The software includes elements of machine learning to help improve the accuracy of results, Jan Pickard, the company’s chief operating officer and co-founder, told CFO Dive.

The company currently has about 30 employees, Marcus said. It has been onboarding at least one new enterprise client every month and has built a portfolio of gaming clients, according to the press release.