Dive Brief:

• Israeli finance tech startup Firmbase Tuesday announced the completion of a $12 million funding round, led by venture capital investment firm S Capital.

• The infusion of cash will, among other purposes, accelerate research and development investments aimed at beefing up the company’s financial planning and analysis tool, according to Firmbase CEO Tomer Federman.

• “We’re investing very heavily on the product development side, and one area that we want to invest in more is generative AI,” Federman said in an interview. “We think there are some very interesting developments there.”

Dive Insight:

Besides S Capital, the funding round involved venture capital firm Meron Capital, as well as a group of more than two dozen “prominent angel investors, including unicorn startup founders, and executives at Google, Amazon and Microsoft,” according to a Firmbase blog post. Both S Capital and Meron are based in Israel.

Firmbase, which was founded in 2021, provides a platform designed to allow CFOs and finance teams to quickly build budgets and financial forecasts, monitor plans against actual company performance and analyze drivers that impact business results.

The platform was officially launched on Tuesday. It had previously been live with paying customers but was in “stealth mode” until the announcement, a spokesperson said. 

Macroeconomic uncertainty and cost pressures are pushing corporate finance teams toward increased technology adoption, Gartner reported last September.

“CFOs are telling their FP&A leaders that they need to improve flexibility of budgeting and forecasting, enable faster capital reallocation, and updated financial models to reflect rapidly changing business realities,” Pritika Bhattacharjee, a vice president of research in Gartner’s finance practice, said in a press release at the time.

Sixty-five percent of finance leaders plan to automate more than half of their processes by the end of 2023, according to survey results released in March by Canada-based financial software company Prophix.

Most of the respondents said their finance technology budgets were expected to increase this year. A majority (52%) expected a slight increase, while 24% anticipated a significant one. Only 4% expected a decrease in technology spending.