The opportunity to build the next generational accounting software

We believe accounting and finance are the underrated superpowers that will set apart the next great founder-CEOs.

It’s no longer enough for founders to build great products. Serious founders need to build great businesses too. Puzzle starts with the premise that numbers are the basic truth of a business. As founders, if we can understand our numbers, we can understand how our business works. When we understand how our business works, we make better decisions. Not every founder knows accounting or finance, but with Puzzle, every founder can understand their numbers, be fundraise ready, and confidently lead their companies.

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The solution starts with rebuilding a smarter general ledger that learns, gets faster and more accurate every day, and intuitively helps you understand and improve your business.

Within minutes of connecting, founders see their financials, metrics and reconciliations, automatically drafted, flagging what is needed for expert review. It’s so intuitive that founders can actually get set up themselves, and invite their bookkeeper or get matched with an on-demand expert via Puzzle’s network anytime.

The best part is the system learns and gets better every day… better at categorizing, identifying and surfacing important changes, and automatically reconciling your accounts all designed to save you time and money while improving transparency and accuracy. It is rare to still find such large opportunities where software can lower costs and improve capabilities at the same time.

So how can we automate so much that was manually prepared before? We are riding the impressive wave started by the teams at Stripe, Brex, Ramp, Mercury, Rippling, Gusto, and Plaid who built modern APIs that enable industry-defining automation and differentiation for their customers.  Puzzle is the modern complement to these solutions, allowing you to scale faster with less effort and higher confidence.

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Small business accounting was never built to steer companies through rapid growth or quickly changing markets.  Puzzle was.

Accounting software was built decades ago, at a different time for a different kind of business. Snapshots from legacy accounting software tell founders very little, yet take weeks of work for finance teams to piece together manually across various systems, and even then require a fundamental understanding of accounting to understand.  Puzzle streams and reconciles data in real-time to make the outputs intuitive and traceable to the rich details lost in traditional accounting summaries. When founders are navigating fast change, they can’t wait weeks to adapt to an ever-changing market.

At first glance, it is easy to confuse Puzzle as just a new accounting system. But that would be a category error – Puzzle checks off the core accounting system boxes, but is also a powerful, API-enabled financial data platform to manage a startup’s complete finances in one place.  Making decisions on stale data or in data silos is no longer acceptable—and no longer necessary.  Accounting can be upgraded from the dead-end of a startup’s data to the driver of confident, informed, and aligned decision-making.

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We think the future of accounting looks more like an API-enabled financial data platform, structured by a smart general ledger, connected to the best solutions on the market.

Modern companies want to use the best software, not mediocre software that happens to be bundled into their accounting system.  So we built an API that will unbundle the legacy concept of an ERP. Here are a few early proofs of concepts (with a lot more coming soon) …

• Runway: One-click financial planning
  ‍Puzzle pushes data in real-time to startuprunway.io, the simplest FP&A tool for very early startups, and Runway.com, one of the most powerful modern FP&A software solutions for scaling startups.  All with one click.
• AngelList: Real-time founder dashboard and investor updates
  ‍AngelList Stack is the go-to place for venture-backed startups to incorporate, open a bank account, and manage a cap table. Now, AngelList has financial dashboards powered by Puzzle for investor updates and business management.
• Accounting App for Stripe
  ‍The first accounting software built native to the Stripe API, Puzzle was invited to be an inaugural app as part of the Stripe App Marketplace launch. Puzzle users can see their financial summaries and highlights right in Stripe, for increased visibility and less context switching.
• Arc: Instant credit underwriting
  ‍Puzzle enables Arc to create the first real-time credit underwriting for startups that don’t have updated financials that can be trusted and verified, increasing trust for both parties.

$10B+ categorized, 500+ startups connected, and $20M of capital later, we are excited to build for you.

Additional reading:

• End of Accounting (Baruch Lev and Feng Gu)
• The CFO in Crisis Mode: Modern Times Call for New Tools (a16z)
• The Finance Tech Stack: Opportunities for Innovation (Redpoint Ventures)
• Rise of the Next-Gen CFO: The Evolution of Finance’s Role and Tech Stack (Sapphire Ventures)
• HBR: Where financial reporting still falls short