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Austin headquartered Sudozi, a company that provides a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform to help enterprises improve their money management capabilities, today announced it has raised $4.3 million in a seed round of funding.
No matter the organization, finance leaders often struggle with a lot of manual grunt work when dealing with financial aspects. This could be anything from surprise invoices coming across without context to endless meetings to reconcile departmental budgets against actuals. Many frequently receive random pings for approvals and guidance throughout their day, leaving little time for the main job of strategic decision-making and saving money for the company.
“Modern finance teams want to manage vendor procurement, headcount and budget tracking through one platform, but the data needed to do so is stuck in spreadsheets and disparate systems. Most companies don’t have the resources to build an internal system to connect all the dots and give their finance teams the visibility they need to support rapid business growth,” Rose Punkunus, founder and CEO of Sudozi, said.
Sudozi’s platform centralizes everything
To tackle these challenges, Punkunus and team developed an integrated, real-time platform that automates workflows and brings together all vendor, spending and budget information in a single place. This gives finance teams a way to collaborate, approve and track spending with confidence and take decisions for business growth.
“The platform is easy to use and fast to get set up. We work with payment tools, so we see the full spectrum of AP (accounts payable) systems used by our customers,” Punkunus told Venturebeat.
“Some of our customers’ favorite Sudozi features are vendor renewal alerts, consolidated real-time access to budgets vs. actuals and easy-to-use spend request workflows to ensure proper approvals and alignment,” she added.
In addition to this, the platform also offers automated department roles and permissions to securely share relevant details with department leaders, live integration with QuickBooks Online to complete an organization’s financial picture and a consolidated database and contract repository to track all vendors, statement of works (SOWs), commitments and renewals to avoid wasted budget and surprise expenses.
Competition
While the offering sounds promising, it must be noted that this is a very competitive space with many players already active in the market, including Brex, Precoro, Bento, Vic.ai and Airbase. Punkunus, however, claims their platform differentiates from the crowd with its simple setup and wider connectivity to show the complete financial picture.
“Whereas an enterprise finance platform can take months to set up and a team of consultants to implement, we’re up and running in hours and automating workflows in days. We also connect to your ERP, surfacing financial data and budget insights directly in the app,” she said.
Mar Hershenson from Pear VC, which led the seed round, emphasized that other solutions merely create a dashboard debacle and neither automate workflows nor provide an opportunity for informed decision-making and collaboration, but Sudozi makes real-time finance a reality.
Now, the company will use the funding to build on its progress and scale further. It will grow the size of its team, enhance the capabilities of its solution and expand market reach. The CEO did not comment on the exact product plans, but the immediate focus of the company will be on building out additional data integrations with financial tools like Sage Intacct and Oracle NetSuite.
According to an Ernst & Young survey, 53% of finance leaders believe that more than half of finance tasks currently handled by people could be performed by AI over the next three years.
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