InScope Nabs $14.5M to End Financial Reporting Nightmare

AI-powered financial reporting platform InScope secured $14.5 million in Series A funding to automate tedious accounting tasks and eliminate manual spreadsheet workflows for companies nationwide.

The Pain of Manual Financial Reporting

Preparing corporate financial statements is a notoriously complex and tedious process, as anyone who has ever examined a 10-K or 10-Q filing can attest. Despite the presence of legacy platforms like Workiva and Donnelley Financial Solutions designed to streamline these workflows, accountants frequently find themselves bogged down by repetitive manual hurdles.

This persistent frustration led industry veterans Mary Antony and Kelsey Gootnick to seek a better way. The duo met seven years ago at Flexport, serving as assistant controller and controller, respectively. Even as their careers diverged—with Antony moving to Miro and Gootnick joining Hopin and later Thrive Global—they remained in close contact, bonded by their shared professional headaches.

“The way financial statements come together, it’s just patched together in a lot of spreadsheets, moved into a bunch of Word documents, emailed back and forth between people,” Antony explained.

Automating the Accounting Workflow

To solve this widespread industry bottleneck, Antony and Gootnick teamed up with co-founder and CTO Jared Tibshraeny to launch InScope in 2023. The startup’s AI-driven platform automates the highly manual “busy work” of financial statement preparation, ranging from math verification to formatting consistency. Simply ensuring that dollar signs and commas are uniform can reclaim up to 20% of an accountant’s time, according to Antony.

var playerInstance_jwplayer_6a6916e99af48 = jwplayer( “jwplayer_6a6916e99af48” );
playerInstance_jwplayer_6a6916e99af48.setup({
playlist: “https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/nsQAyeWN”,
});

Rapid Adoption in a Risk-Averse Market

InScope’s value proposition is resonating strongly with the market. Over the past 12 months, the startup has scaled its customer base fivefold, attracting prominent accounting firms such as CohnReznick, which currently ranks in the top 15 nationally.

While the accounting profession is traditionally risk-averse and may take time to fully embrace autonomous AI generation for income statements and balance sheets, complete automation remains InScope’s long-term objective.

Why Investors Are Betting on InScope

The startup’s rapid traction facilitated its latest $14.5 million Series A round. Led by Norwest, the investment round also saw participation from Storm Ventures, alongside existing backers Better Tomorrow Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Sean Jacobsohn, a partner at Norwest, decided to back the company after receiving stellar feedback from multiple clients who reported significant time savings using the platform. Jacobsohn emphasized that InScope’s competitive edge lies in the founders’ deep domain expertise.

“It’s a very complex space, and you need to be able to have been in the shoes of the buyer before,” Jacobsohn noted. While accountants rarely transition into tech founders, Antony and Gootnick honed their entrepreneurial drive through years of operating within fast-paced, high-growth startup environments.