SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mosaic, the first Strategic Finance Platform, today announced it has raised $25 million in Series B financing. This brings its total funding to $46 million in under 14 months. The round was led by Founders Fund, with participation from existing investors General Catalyst, XYZ Venture Capital, Fifth Down Capital, and Friends & Family Capital. The deal reunites Peter Thiel, Managing Partner at Founders Fund and Co-founder of both Palantir Technologies and PayPal, with the team that helped build the finance department at Palantir. Funding will be used to further expand the company's product development and go to market teams as Mosaic continues to add greater depth and flexibility to its suite of financial products, transforming the way CFOs operate. This includes a new topline planning component that will debut later this year.
In addition to funding, Mosaic demonstrated impressive momentum with triple-digit growth in its customer base since completing its Series A financing in early 2020. The company has done so by helping high-growth companies like Pipe, Kandji, Drata, Fivetran, Sourcegraph, and Crossbeam meet the challenges of rapid scale by delivering real-time analytics and dynamic planning features that help their finance teams collaborate with department heads, enabling current and future unicorns to unlock profit drivers and grow faster than ever before.
"Strategic finance is still trapped inside of Excel," said John Luttig, Principal of Funders Fund. "Mosaic recognized that a shift to Google Sheets wasn't going to drive the future of finance. Its platform brings financial planning into the modern era."
At a time when hyper growth companies are scaling faster than ever, Mosaic is driving a vision of strategic finance where companies don’t have to rely on manual financial analysis and planning in spreadsheets that can’t keep pace with business needs. In fact, over the past 12 months alone, more than $500 million in venture capital has poured into the sector to help business leaders gain control over their growth trajectory. And with remote job postings increasing nearly 300% between 2019 and 2021, it’s been harder than ever to keep departments aligned and generate a complete, up-to-date view of the business.
“A wave of department-specific cloud solutions has fragmented company data. And there hasn’t been a strong enough solution to help finance teams at high-growth companies handle that fragmentation to move beyond legacy FP&A processes,” said Bijan Moallemi, CEO and Co-founder of Mosaic. “Business intelligence is highly technical. ERP systems offer great snapshots, but limited visibility across the business. And point solutions answer hyper-specific department questions without showing the bigger picture. Mosaic is gaining traction because we’re breaking down data silos, bringing all the pieces of a company’s puzzle together, and empowering CFOs to focus more of their time and effort on forward-looking growth initiatives.”
The Rise of Strategic Finance
Mosaic launched in 2019 on the concept of strategic finance, a long overdue reboot of traditional FP&A functions. Since launch, “strategic finance” has seen a surge in job titles across LinkedIn as companies like Sourcegraph, Zendesk, Uber, Instacart, SeatGeek, SoFi, and Intercom embrace the concept. More recently, Stanford Business School started offering a Strategic Finance Leadership Program, further emphasizing the trend toward a new era for the office of the CFO.
Over the last year, Mosaic has focused on building out features for core components of its strategic finance platform centered around data integration, real-time analytics, and agile planning. The result gives finance leaders full control over what data they want to analyze without the need for technical skill sets. Mosaic’s Analysis Canvas is part dashboard, part document, providing teams a space for building collaborative flash reports with hundreds of out-of-the-box metrics, significantly accelerating critical decision making.
“The reality is, answering even the most basic questions about the current state of a business can be surprisingly painful,” said Joseph Garafalo, COO and Co-founder at Mosaic. “The embarrassing secret finance professionals don’t like to admit is that highly skilled finance professionals spend a majority of their effort wrangling data together from a dozen tools just to unlock basic facts about their business. Mosaic is building the connective tissue that automates this process so finance teams can spend less time in the back office and more time playing the part of a strategic business partner.”
Strategic finance encompasses more than analytics about the past and present. Mosaic offers a variety of dynamic modeling components helping CFOs better predict future performance focused on Headcount Planning, Income Statement Planning, Cash Flow Forecasting, and Revenue modeling. These intelligent building blocks enable leaders to easily create plans, model scenarios, and compare performance to plan in a few clicks– all leveraging a heavy dose of automation, and predictive insights.
Empowering the Next Generation of Strategic Finance Leaders
The traditional path for finance teams has long been to build plans and models in spreadsheets until data scale and complexity break them, at which point they transition to a business intelligence platform or an enterprise-level FP&A platform. But there’s been a gray area where spreadsheets break and when companies can hire an entire team to handle the complexity of legacy FP&A platforms. Modern finance software needs to balance enterprise-level functionality with the flexibility to support growth at all stages.
Companies like Pipe are a strong indication that high-growth organizations are ready to move beyond the spreadsheet phase but don’t want the headaches of legacy FP&A platforms.
“The Finance team could be seen as the growth accelerator for the entire organization. We sit at the intersection of all company data, both financial and operational, and yet existing platforms in the marketplace can be cumbersome, inflexible, or outdated,” said Tony Le, Director of Finance at Pipe. “Mosaic, by contrast, understands the impact an empowered finance department can make. Its platform provides a 360° view of the business which is critical during the hyper-growth stage of a company's lifecycle. With Mosaic, the opportunity to collaborate, stay aligned, and make informed financial decisions quickly gives us an advantage."
Learn more about the announcement here or watch this video for an intro to Mosaic.
About Mosaic
Mosaic was founded in 2019 by three finance leaders who knew the office of the CFO needed an overhaul. Tasked with supporting business decisions for several companies in hyper-growth, they were frustrated by the slow speed, high complexity and inefficiencies existing tools in the market offered. With this challenge in mind, they set out to build a platform that would address the technical challenges modern day finance and business teams face.
Today Mosaic is deployed by some of the fastest growing companies, helping them align, collaborate and plan for the future. For the latest strategic finance news, be sure to connect with them on LinkedIn and Twitter.
About Founders Fund
Founders Fund invests in the world’s most important and valuable companies across all geographies, sectors and stages. The firm’s partners have been founders and early funders of companies including PayPal, SpaceX, Palantir, Airbnb, Stripe and Facebook. Founders Fund pursues a founder-friendly investment strategy, providing maximum support with minimum interference. More information is available at www.foundersfund.com.
About General Catalyst
General Catalyst is a venture capital firm that invests in powerful, positive change that endures — for our entrepreneurs, our investors, our people, and society. We support founders with a long-term view who challenge the status quo, partnering with them from seed to growth stage and beyond to build companies that withstand the test of time. With offices in San Francisco, Palo Alto, New York City, London, and Boston, the firm has helped support the growth of businesses such as: Airbnb, Deliveroo, Guild, Gusto, Hubspot, Illumio, Lemonade, Livongo, Oscar, Samsara, Snap, Stripe, and Warby Parker. For more: www.generalcatalyst.com.
