Causal inks $20m Series A

Causal, a collaborative platform for financial modelling, has raised $20 million in Series A funding. Coatue and Accel led the round.

PRESS RELEASE

Causal, a collaborative platform for financial modelling, has raised a $20m Series A funding round led by Coatue and Accel.

The investment round — which follows a $4.2m seed round in March — also included a number of high-profile angel investors including Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, Notion COO Akshay Kothari and Brex CRO Sam Blond. Existing investors include AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant and Adobe CPO Scott Belsky.

The funding follows the rapid growth of the London-founded startup which added 30% more customers month-on-month last year. Causal is hiring rapidly, with plans to grow from 12 employees to 50 globally by the end of 2022.

Founded in 2019 by Taimur Abdaal and Lukas Köbis, the product was born out of a frustration with the lack of collaboration options available to those working with financial models.

Time and again, they found that companies were relying on spreadsheets that few people within the business truly understood how to use. Alongside this, with no way to connect to live data sources, companies were putting a lot of time and resources into manual workflows and workarounds to overcome the shortcomings of traditional spreadsheets. Finally, they found that companies had very few ways to collaborate and present spreadsheets to stakeholders in real-time, often resorting to sharing static images of spreadsheets that couldn’t be amended rather than run the risk of breaking the spreadsheet itself.

It was from these problems that Causal arose, with Abdaal and Köbis using their mathematics and machine-learning backgrounds to create a tool that empowers anyone in a company to build, share, and understand financial models — the numbers that drive their business decisions.

Where previously spreadsheets were the sole domain of the finance team, what sets Causal apart is its function as a tool that anyone in a company can use. Finance teams make up the majority of Causal’s revenue today, but the product’s user base also includes sales teams, engineering teams and marketing teams — Causal’s vision is to democratise business planning and make it accessible to every team in a company.

Real-time financial modelling with a user-experience focus
At its core, Causal lets users create cloud-based financial models, connect them directly to live data wherever it’s stored, and share them through interactive dashboards with beautiful visuals.

Built with a user-focus and unlike traditional spreadsheet apps, Causal formulas can be written in plain English (Profit=Revenue-Costs, not C3=A3-B3), letting teams easily understand each other’s work. Models can be linked together across teams (with version control), so that everyone can focus on their own numbers.

One of Causal’s unique features is the ability to create stunning visuals in a single click. Unlike traditional spreadsheets, anyone on the team can quickly generate beautiful charts and tables in Causal, without spending hours on customisation and configuration. These live charts and tables can be presented in Causal or embedded into a company’s existing tools, such as Notion.

The results are stark when it comes to efficiency. Causal’s live data integrations with hundreds of systems (accounting/ERP, CRM, data warehouses, and more) typically save finance teams one to two days of work per month, and when it comes to financial modelling, the benefit of Causal is even more impressive — users report that it takes one day of work on Causal to complete what would normally take four or five days with traditional spreadsheets.