Growfin raises $7.5M led by SWC Global helping businesses improve cash flow efficiency by 33%.

The prevailing economic conditions with a looming recession, valuation adjustments and a tough fundraising environment mean companies are looking to optimize their cash flows to ensure a sustainable growth path. Helping these companies gain unbiased insights, fintech startup Growfin is today announcing a $7.5 million Series A funding round to bring real-time transparency and predictability to today’s CFOs.

The funding round was led by Singapore-based SWC Global, with participation from existing 3one4 Capital investors and business angels, including CFOs and other industry leaders. This funding round follows an 8x increase in customer numbers over the past 12 months, during which Growfin helped businesses raise $1 billion in receivables (AR). Notable clients include Intercom, Locus, Mindticle and others who have been able to increase their cash flow by 33% month on month by collecting their ARs on time or faster. Globally, AR for B2B companies stands at $125 trillion per year, with 30% of that outstanding each month, giving Growfin a substantial service opportunity.

Today’s CFOs struggle to deal with transparency and predictability in their customer fundraising cycle, many of whom still rely on spreadsheets to solve this problem. Growfin has created a unique CRM system for financial management that solves these problems for finance and revenue departments. With automation, collaboration tools, and real-time payment tracking capabilities, it helps finance, sales, and customer success teams come together in one place to manage customer relationships through the payment process and improve payment collection efficiency. It easily integrates with any ERP systems (which link invoices to payments) and CRM systems (which link leads to sales) to speed up the collection of payments from customers, improve cash flow and improve the financial health of the business.

The company, founded in 2021 by Aravind Gopalan and Raja Jayaram, the founders for the second time (withdrew), was faced with a lack of cash flow restrictions in its previous ventures and sought to rectify this. They publicly launched Growfin in March 2022, holding focus groups of over 200 financial professionals from around the world to build the product.

Aravind Gopalan, co-founder and CEO of Growfin, commented: “Getting paid and being paid on time has been a challenge as long as commerce has existed for businesses of all sizes. Receivables management and payment collection are often complex and challenging tasks as companies grow. Despite the rise of ERP and CRM like Salesforce and Netsuite, I’ve realized that 90% of finance teams still manage their AR processes outside of these tools, usually with spreadsheets or internal databases. We are building a tool specifically built for augmented reality management by integrating with ERP and CRM, replacing all those spreadsheets and low quality systems.”

“Growfin allows everyone involved in billing, including customers, to collaborate in one place where they all see the same information and help resolve billing issues faster. This collaborative approach will bring greater efficiency and greater transparency, and build trust between customers and businesses to collect B2B payments faster.”

“Over the past year, I have met with countless CFOs, and two important observations stuck in my head. They have serious concerns about the accuracy of the data reporting their cash flow positions and as such they expect their companies’ performance to come under increased scrutiny from their boards and investors in 2023 due to current market conditions. conditions. Growfin solves these headaches for CFOs.”

In support of Growfin’s ideas and proposals, a recent Gartner report found that tech CEOs and CFOs feel underprepared for the current economic downturn, with 78% investing in cash flow automation and transparency to build a CFO tech stack to handle the crisis . In addition, well-known venture capitalists such as a16z and Redpoint ventures are also calling for an upgrade of the CFO’s tech stack as the way forward.

Tak Lai Koh, founding partner of SWC Global, added: “The AI-powered Growfin system is poised to change the way businesses pay bills, leveraging ERP systems such as Netsuite and Microsoft Dynamics that dominate the industry. With over 100,000 clients worldwide, finance departments using these systems can now connect to Growfin to take a deeper and broader view of their financial well-being through cash flow efficiency and real-time forecasting. Aravind and Raja are young but very experienced and we are excited to be part of their journey.”

Growfin will make significant investments in its technology stack and product portfolio in 2023, expanding its offering from financial CRM to a comprehensive, integrated cash management solution that will enable B2B businesses to optimize and manage cash flow to empower their product’s AI capabilities. . This evolution will help companies optimize their working capital and drive growth.