Sapien Raises $8.7M Seed Led by General Catalyst

This funding from top investors in AI and finance will support larger-scale research efforts to build the AI that helps humans run companies.

The “traditional CFO” is dead.

For decades, CFOs have spent their time on rearward-looking number crunching to track and approve company budgets. This used to be purely a defensive role, but today, CFOs play on both sides of the ball. They are quickly evolving to be a company’s most dynamic offensive weapon—driving investments into growth, creating operational efficiencies, and unlocking new opportunities for scale.

These new-era CFOs need to understand every facet of their companies in order to make these critical decisions, especially when it involves capital allocation. This is not the reality at today’s enterprises.

The world’s biggest companies are flying blind.

The financial infrastructure of the world’s biggest companies is scarily fragile.

Many Fortune 500 giants manage billions in revenue with unwieldy, multi-million row Excel spreadsheets. Global enterprises grapple with 136 disjointed, outdated ERPs that would require years and millions of dollars to reconcile. These same companies even spend years relying on models that make eight-figure errors.

Humans are doing work that should be left to machines. The sheer volume and fragmentation of key information create an error-prone process, forcing finance teams to rely on incomplete data for their most critical decisions.

The industry is trying to fix a glaring gap with bandaids and baby steps.

Many solutions fall into a few categories:

The Point Solution Patchwork

Tackle every problem individually and end up with 15 different SaaS solutions that don’t communicate. More time is spent managing IT and switching apps than analyzing data.

The Dashboard Delusion

Adopt business intelligence tools that provide dashboards, charts, and tables but often lack actionable, tailored insights.

The Chatbot Chasm

Some “AI” solutions act as glorified search tools. They fetch data but cannot truly understand or act on it.

Enterprise finance isn’t just about numbers—it’s about the story behind them. True financial intelligence requires deep contextual understanding, which is only now becoming possible.

We’re taking the leap. Sapien deeply understands company financials.

We are building the first AI-native system from the ground up for CFOs and finance teams.

Sapien connects siloed data sources—from Excel sheets to ERPs, CRMs, and unstructured data—to enable autonomous coworkers to deliver insights in minutes instead of days or weeks.

Examples:

• Manufacturing: Analyze raw transaction data across plants to uncover key impacts.
• Healthcare: Evaluate revenue and trends across clinics to provide growth recommendations.
• Software: Compare unstructured data across large customer cohorts to harness growth trends.

Sapien reduces over 100 hours of manual work to just five minutes of AI supervision. It has already caught multi-million dollar mistakes and helps PE portfolio companies streamline operations.

We prioritize reliability and transparency.

Answers are only as good as the assumptions behind them. We focus on:

• Agent observability: Surfacing how Sapien breaks down and processes queries.
• Verifiable tools: Minimizing hallucination risks by showing data sources and transformations.
• Intervention & collaboration: Users can challenge assumptions, redirect data sources, and guide Sapien’s thinking.

This design makes Sapien approachable to non-technical users while maintaining deep technical rigor.

We’re building the instant & org-wide enterprise finance future.

Sapien aims to transform not just efficiency, but the nature of human work:

• Analyze 100 scenarios in an hour vs. 2 per week.
• Surface autonomous, actionable insights at scale.

Already, other teams—CEOs, marketers, legal teams—are using Sapien to access financial insights without burdening analysts.

Can AI run a company?

Today, Sapien is the most advanced autonomous coworker for enterprise financial analysis. But our long-term goal is the shadow CFO:

• Automate low-level analysis.
• Preemptively identify opportunities and risks.
• Prepare CFOs to act before they even sit down for coffee.

In 5 years, we envision every CFO using Sapien to stay fully informed and act strategically at lightning speed.

We’re making it happen.

We’ve raised $8.7M to accelerate our vision. Our investors include:

• General Catalyst (Niko Bonatsos & Max Rimpel)
• Neo (Ali Partovi and team)
• K5 (Bryan Baum)
• Angels from Cognition, Stripe, Adobe, Ramp, Notion, OpenAI, and more.

We’re hiring deeply technical, product-obsessed researchers and engineers. Interested? Join us.

If you’re a CFO wanting to play offense with your data, request a demo.