Accounting automation and collaboration platform FloQast raises $110M
FloQast, an accounting collaboration, automation, and close-management platform, has raised $110 million in a series D round of funding at a $1.2 billion valuation.
Financial close management is the business process of checking and adjusting account balances at the end of each month or other predefined period to publish compliant financial reports for regulators, managers, shareholders, or any other stakeholder that needs to know a company’s current financial position. But getting a company’s books into shape is easier said than done, particularly for larger businesses — more often than not it’s a manual, time-consuming process rife with human error. This is where FloQast comes in.
Close call
Founded in 2013, Los Angeles-based FloQast works with a slew of high-profile customers, including Snowflake, Zoom, Lyft, GrubHub, Twilio, and Yelp. The company’s flagship FloQast Close product serves as a centralized place for teams to manage all their recurring close-management work, including outstanding tasks; collaborative checklists and review notes for assigning tasks and viewing who needs to do what; and a transparent roll-up of all account reconciliations, replete with ERP and Excel integrations to automate part of the auditing “tie-out” process.
Elsewhere, FloQast includes support for automated alerts if amounts change after sign-offs are finalized, and users can configure the platform to automatically request more information from relevant parties if anything is missing during a close. Built-in analytics can also help managers track efficiencies by using historical data to spot month-end close trends over time and identify bottlenecks.
Automation for the people
FloQast had previously raised around $93 million, and with its latest cash injection, the company is well-financed to capitalize on a growing push toward automation across the accountancy sphere. In the past few months alone, companies including Osome, Auditoria, Zeni, Lockstep, and Georges have all raised sizable sums to help accountancy teams automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks.
But perhaps more than that, FloQast is well-positioned to support the burgeoning remote work trend that is likely to linger long after the global pandemic subsides. Team collaboration tools such as Zoom, Slack, and Microsoft Teams have already benefited from a more distributed workforce, and FloQast’s shared workspace is designed to fulfill a similar function for finance teams.
FloQast’s series D round was led by Meritech Capital, with participation from Insight Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, Coupa Ventures, Polaris Partners, and Norwest Venture Partners.