Julio Martínez of Abacum, co-founder and chief executive officer, joins theCUBE Research to discuss Abacum’s artificial intelligence native approach to financial planning and analysis, hereafter FP&A. Martínez explains how Abacum unifies accounting and operational key performance indicators, leverages knowledge-graph architectures and machine learning, hereafter ML, for data normalization, and orchestrates large language models, hereafter LLMs, to support forecasting, reporting and scenario planning. They emphasize the importance of clean machine-readable financial and operational data to enable reliable AI-driven FP&A workflows.
Martínez highlights efficient LLM orchestration that routes routine tasks to cost-efficient models while reserving advanced models for high-value use cases. Analysts note Abacum’s rapid product iteration, heavy investment in research and development, strong customer retention and emphasis on integrations, governance and scenario modeling to empower finance as a strategic operator. Hosts Gemma Allen, John Furrier and Dave Vellante lead the conversation.
Forgot Password
Almost there!
We just sent you a verification email. Please verify your account to gain access to
theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Mixture of Experts Series. If you don’t think you received an email check your
spam folder.
Sign in to theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Mixture of Experts Series.
In order to sign in, enter the email address you used to registered for the event. Once completed, you will receive an email with a verification link. Open this link to automatically sign into the site.
Register For theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Mixture of Experts Series
Please fill out the information below. You will recieve an email with a verification link confirming your registration. Click the link to automatically sign into the site.
You’re almost there!
We just sent you a verification email. Please click the verification button in the email. Once your email address is verified, you will have full access to all event content for theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Mixture of Experts Series.
I want my badge and interests to be visible to all attendees.
Checking this box will display your presense on the attendees list, view your profile and allow other attendees to contact you via 1-1 chat. Read the Privacy Policy. At any time, you can choose to disable this preference.
Select your Interests!
add
Upload your photo
Uploading..
OR
Connect via Twitter
Connect via Linkedin
EDIT PASSWORD
Share
Forgot Password
Almost there!
We just sent you a verification email. Please verify your account to gain access to
theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Mixture of Experts Series. If you don’t think you received an email check your
spam folder.
Sign in to theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Mixture of Experts Series.
In order to sign in, enter the email address you used to registered for the event. Once completed, you will receive an email with a verification link. Open this link to automatically sign into the site.
Sign in to gain access to theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Mixture of Experts Series
Please sign in with LinkedIn to continue to theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Mixture of Experts Series. Signing in with LinkedIn ensures a professional environment.
Are you sure you want to remove access rights for this user?
Details
Manage Access
email address
Community Invitation
Julio Martínez, Abacum
Julio Martínez of Abacum, co-founder and chief executive officer, joins theCUBE Research to discuss Abacum’s artificial intelligence native approach to financial planning and analysis, hereafter FP&A. Martínez explains how Abacum unifies accounting and operational key performance indicators, leverages knowledge-graph architectures and machine learning, hereafter ML, for data normalization, and orchestrates large language models, hereafter LLMs, to support forecasting, reporting and scenario planning. They emphasize the importance of clean machine-readable financial and operational data to enable reliable AI-driven FP&A workflows.
Martínez highlights efficient LLM orchestration that routes routine tasks to cost-efficient models while reserving advanced models for high-value use cases. Analysts note Abacum’s rapid product iteration, heavy investment in research and development, strong customer retention and emphasis on integrations, governance and scenario modeling to empower finance as a strategic operator. Hosts Gemma Allen, John Furrier and Dave Vellante lead the conversation.
>> ... Palo Alto Studio connecting Silicon Valley and Wall Street.
John Furrier
>> I'm John Furrier here with Dave Vellante, my co-host.
Gemma Allen
>> Welcome back to theCUBE Studio here at the New York Stock Exchange. I'm Gemma Allen with NYSE Wired, and this is Mixture of Experts. And Joining me today is a man who's going to talk all things AI and the future of FinTech. Julio Martínez, CEO and Co-founder of Abacum. Welcome, Julio.
Julio Martínez
>> Gemma, thanks so much for having me.
Gemma Allen
>> Delighted to have you. And we're going to get into why you're on the show this week because you're a part of a celebration that's happening here on Thursday. But before we get there, tell me a little bit about Abacum. What is it exactly that you guys do?
Julio Martínez
>> Yeah. Abacum is the leading AI-native financial planning and analysis platform. So that basically means that we support finance teams in having clean data and normalized data so they can extract the most value out of AI. We also enable finance team with enhanced reporting, forecasting, budgeting scenarios so that they can drive business outcomes.
Gemma Allen
>> Explain life before and after Abacum. You're a CFO, you're doing a lot of stuff on spreadsheets. There's a lot of data. You have the data, you just probably don't know what to do with it a lot of the time, right?
Julio Martínez
>> Yeah.
Gemma Allen
>> That's been a long-term challenge. What exactly does Abacum change? Does it connect these systems to each other? Does it create visualization? Try and bring it to life a bit.
Julio Martínez
>> Absolutely. So the before is usually disconnected systems and then finance teams are struggling to get all this data together that is clean. Then they spend a lot of time in manual work just cleaning data and then digging out the insights that are going to make them relevant to the business. So oftentimes you've heard about finance as the scorekeeper, the bookkeeper, the back office function, always late with a report. Nobody really cares about. It's only financial information. With Abacum, we bring all these dispersed systems into a single source of truth, right? So you have all the accounting data, but also all the operational KPIs that matter to the business, always clean in real time for finance to analyze. And with that, we enable them to automate the reporting that is relevant to the board of directors, the management team, the different stakeholders like sales or marketing so they can drive business outcomes. They can provide the information that matters when it matters, right? Different scenarios, oh, what's going to happen with interest rates? What's going to happen with international trade? Incorporating those scenarios into decision-making. So the post is clean data insights when it matters and definitely finance in the driver's seat of the business.
Gemma Allen
>> So are you competing predominantly with Excel and legacy thinking and behavior patterns that have been built over decades or are you competing with other SaaS players? Who's the core competitor for this? Who you're trying to take out?
Julio Martínez
>> Yeah. So think of Adaptive Insights now acquired by Workday. Think of some other legacy players such as Anaplan or Planful, right? Very relevant SaaS businesses that were most of them founded 25 years ago, right? So they are actually pre-cloud, pre smartphones, and definitely pre-AI, right? We've emerged as the very clear leader of the AI-native solutions to bring the finance team to the AI world.
Gemma Allen
>> So you mentioned that there is an expectation now, a fast growing expectation, especially in the world of tokenomics and all of this financial mania that's happening around us and in tech that CFOs and financial teams become more strategic operators, right?
Julio Martínez
>> Yeah.
Gemma Allen
>> We've seen that happening across the business. To become a strategic operator, there are a certain level of insight, data, but also I guess repeatability and decision-making velocity needed, right?
Julio Martínez
>> Yeah.
Gemma Allen
>> That probably was that needed maybe five years ago.
Julio Martínez
>> Absolutely.
Gemma Allen
>> How are things shifting kind of week to week, month to month in this space? How are you building a system and a product, not just for next month, but for two years from now at a time where everything feels somewhat chaotic?
Julio Martínez
>> Yeah. So we are going through a tectonic shift movement, right? Everything feels that is changing very fast. Definitely AI has been a tailwind for us, right? Before us, maybe some of the legacy players still had a halo effect on their brand because they had been in the market for longer. Today, CFOs, VP of finance, VPs of FP&A are really looking to incorporate and embrace through AI technology into their workflows, right? So this has really catapulted us. To answer your questions, we continue hiring engineers and product managers and designers left and right. We've not only more than triple productivity, but engineer and that continues compounding, but we continue enhancing that team. We heavily invest in R&D when other players stall, right? They stopped investing in the product a long time ago and they're trying to milk the cow. So this is a big contrast. We continue shipping product every single day actually. So a data point for me is that this quarter, our average is 21 PRs every day, every single day. So this is the level of innovation that we are bringing to the market. At a point in time, to your point, expectations on CFOs are through the roof.
Gemma Allen
>> For sure.
Julio Martínez
>> Think of it. Everybody's looking at them, they're on the spotlight and they are being looked at as how are you incorporating AI to drive performance, to drive productivity, to enhance efficiency in the business? And they need to deliver answers now.
Gemma Allen
>> I think FinTech in general has been a fast adopter of AI, right? We've seen a lot of companies make a lot of progress in a very short space of time in the space. There's this counter argument that AI is making everyone Harry Potter. We're all suddenly wizards and we can do all sorts of stuff for ourselves. Vibe coding solutions, et cetera, et cetera. When it comes to the world of FP&A though, which is so incredibly clinical by design and by necessity, what are your thoughts when people say, "Well, five years from now, ChatGPT or Claude or whatever will be vibe coding all this for CFOs." What do you respond to that with?
Julio Martínez
>> Yeah, I love this provocation, right? And I think that hey, spreadsheets and Claude or spreadsheets and any given LLM, I think they have a place in the market, right? There are a lot of SMBs that they probably don't need FP&A software because their business complexity is not very high. And hey, a smarter spreadsheets on a spreadsheet with an LLM, it's good for them. Now at some point in time, that business complexity increases to a point where that solution no longer holds, right? So the point of spreadsheets plus an LLM starts to break at some point in time and I'll explain where. Also vibe coding a solution. Look, the provocation I always bring back to that point is, hey, we are extremely focused on building the best financial planning and analysis platform for the market. If on top of that, now I need to build a CRM, an HIRS and a hiring software, an ERP for accounting, and I look at my list of vendors, probably we have 100 vendors that we buy software from. What do I need to hire now? 100 more engineers to build all of those solutions or will I rely on a vendor that has made their obsession to build the best solution for me, right? So I think that we are living on the moment where there is a little bit too much hype in the SaaSpocalypse. I think there is a market for all of us, particularly on FP&A. Heck, FP&A is not only about the data. You need to have a good number of integrations. You need to clean the data with AI. You want to build the model and the business logic. You need collaborative workflows with a human in the loop for approvals. You need governance and security and scalability in data. And then on top of that, that gives you the foundation and the framework to 10X your outcomes with AI. AI on top of a weak foundation doesn't really bring you anywhere.
Gemma Allen
>> No. Talk about the technology itself. Go under the hood for a second.
Julio Martínez
>> Yeah.
Gemma Allen
>> How proprietary is this? How much of it is built on another frontier model? And how do you and any FinTech founder, Julio, I think about this a lot, manage your own tokenomics and your own FP&A when things are again in this AI economy seems to be moving so quickly and the costs seem to be spiraling in only one direction?
Julio Martínez
>> Yeah. So the cost is spiraling for us and for everybody. So we'll need to learn how to address that. But if we look under the hood, look, being AI-native is very real. There are a lot of players that are sprinkling AI on top of rigid architectures that were built pre-cloud actually. What does that mean? In our case, for instance, we leverage AI from the data ingestion throughout the data cleaning. So AI and actually machine learning is used to clean the data and normalize the data. Actually, legacy players and many players out there use old relational databases, relational schemas, all app cubes to hold their data. That is not efficient at all for AI, right? Being AI-native in our case is having, for instance, knowledge graphs, knowledge schemas that allow AI ... That are optimized for AI to read and it's machine readable as we call it from the beginning. So you are building your architecture from the ground up knowing that it needs to be massively consumed by LLMs and not all the LLMs. And now to your point on tokens, we make the consumption of LLMs very efficient because honestly, the latest LLM might be an overkill for certain use cases. Certain use cases are going to deliver the same result with traditional ML or with a very cheap LLM, right? And then we channel those use cases through those cheaper options. So the consumption is more efficient, but then some other use cases might require the latest Opus 4.8, right? But then we enable, we orchestrate the LLMs and the technology so that it becomes very efficient for our customers and they don't need to be all the time at the cutting edge testing the latest one and how to optimize for token consumption.
Gemma Allen
>> That's so interesting, I guess, because there is so many substrates of this, right? When you take these workflows apart and you don't necessarily need a Ferrari to replace a Toyota in certain elements of that stock, right? So it's so true. So Julio, you're here this week because Females in Finance Collective is having a three year celebration here at the NYSE on Thursday and I know you're a key partner of theirs.
Julio Martínez
>> Yeah.
Gemma Allen
>> Talk me through though I guess two sides of this, the relationship with FIF, but also your own journey because this company's five years old, 2021, interesting time, right? ChatGPT and also a massive spike in interest rates. In some respects, you have great foresight in creating a FinTech company targeting CFOs. But what has the journey been like for you in terms of building community here in New York and talk a little bit about, I guess, FIF and how you also bring a product like this to market as a Spanish man moving to New York.
Julio Martínez
>> Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Gemma, thank you so much for this question. First, we are super proud partners of FIF, right? I think the work that FIF and Megan are doing in the community is so formidable. I think, hey, the best community out there and also as a proud father of two daughters, we definitely want to see that momentum of women taking the top place in finance. So really very proud sponsors and partners in the community and we'll do our best always to support those efforts. My personal journey, I'm a finance professional that moved into technology. So I spent close to 17 years in investment banking in New York, São Paulo, Zurich, London, different geographies. I was given an awesome opportunity to start building products. So I became a product guy for four years and then at some point I connected the dots. "Hey, the problem and space I understand the best is FP&A corporate finance, but I know how to build technology now." And I had been exposed to some of the legacy systems during my career. I used some of those legacy systems and I arrived to the conclusion, "Hey, we can generate a 20X experience." So yeah, I decided to leave everything. I launched the business in the middle of COVID, in the middle of interest rates spiking, which didn't make it any easy to be very honest.
Gemma Allen
>> It made your pitch easier though, right? Because I think a lot of CFOs were like, "Crap, I really need to be ahead on this. I need these numbers to be as accurate as they can be," right?
Julio Martínez
>> Totally. You got me there. So yeah, definitely at a point in time where they were craving for scenarios and some more technology to grow efficiently. Then yeah, from the get go, we went through Y Combinator, we've raised over 100 million. So really winning in the market. We are also very efficient. So we follow our own pitch. So we are a company that really praises itself for having the strongest efficiency metrics in the sector and the strongest retention, customer retention in the sector. So yeah.
Gemma Allen
>> Talk about the fundamentals of Y Combinator. If you were to think life before and after, what do you think the synthesis is? What did it really give you?
Julio Martínez
>> Yeah. First, brand recognition, right? We launched the business in the U.S., obviously a huge market, but that was before some of our excellent fans backed us. We were basically unknown and we were targeting small enterprises from the get go. So they look at you like, can I really trust you with a mission critical software? So Y Combinator really offered us that brand recognition? Okay, maybe it made those conversations a bit easier. Obviously the product had to be there.
Gemma Allen
>> of legitimacy, right? For sure.
Julio Martínez
>> Yes.
Gemma Allen
>> Yeah.
Julio Martínez
>> That was the key component. I also want to mention some of those partners are so good. They have been empires. They have built formidable companies and then working with some of those partners that are known to be very hard and then they hit you hard in those office hours, but we learned so much about company building and growing fast and it was an awesome experience.
Gemma Allen
>> Wow. Okay. So Julio, what's ahead? Do you think you guys have raised a series B? Am I correct?
Julio Martínez
>> Yes.
Gemma Allen
>> Where do you go from here? What does the next 12 months look like for you and the team?
Julio Martínez
>> Yeah. So we'll continue our journey of continue growing very fast. We are today the fastest growing financial planning and analysis platform in the market. We continue moving and gaining more business in the enterprise. We'll be raising more capital as it looks like. There is a lot of excitement in the market about us, about the asset, and we feel very privileged. We are growing the team. We have customers in more than 40 countries. We did our company offsite last week and I came to realize, wow, we have teammates from 28 nationalities. So that got me very excited. We are proud of being multicultural and we'll continue going in that direction. In terms of product roadmap, more AI for our customers. It's the most exciting time to be building technology I've ever been. I'm on the senior side of many founders I know and I have to say that it's never been more exciting.
Gemma Allen
>> Well, I hope like many of the Spaniards I know, it also involves a couple of weeks of downtime in Spain in August with your family.
Julio Martínez
>> Absolutely. Absolutely.
Gemma Allen
>> Okay. Thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE.
Julio Martínez
>> Gemma, thank you so much for having me.
Gemma Allen
>> I'm Gemma Allen coming to you from theCUBE Studio at the NYSE. This is Mixture of Experts, one of our programs with NYSE Wired. Thanks for watching.
>> ... Palo Alto Studio connecting Silicon Valley and Wall Street.
John Furrier
>> I'm John Furrier here with Dave Vellante, my co-host.
Gemma Allen
>> Welcome back to theCUBE Studio here at the New York Stock Exchange. I'm Gemma Allen with NYSE Wired, and this is Mixture of Experts. And Joining me today is a man who's going to talk all things AI and the future of FinTech. Julio Martínez, CEO and Co-founder of Abacum. Welcome, Julio.
Julio Martínez
>> Gemma, thanks so much for having me.
Gemma Allen
>> Delighted to have you. And we're going to get into why you're on the show this week because you're a part of a celebration that's happening here on Thursday. But before we get there, tell me a little bit about Abacum. What is it exactly that you guys do?
Julio Martínez
>> Yeah. Abacum is the leading AI-native financial planning and analysis platform. So that basically means that we support finance teams in having clean data and normalized data so they can extract the most value out of AI. We also enable finance team with enhanced reporting, forecasting, budgeting scenarios so that they can drive business outcomes.
Gemma Allen
>> Explain life before and after Abacum. You're a CFO, you're doing a lot of stuff on spreadsheets. There's a lot of data. You have the data, you just probably don't know what to do with it a lot of the time, right?
Julio Martínez
>> Yeah.
Gemma Allen
>> That's been a long-term challenge. What exactly does Abacum change? Does it connect these systems to each other? Does it create visualization? Try and bring it to life a bit.
Julio Martínez
>> Absolutely. So the before is usually disconnected systems and then finance teams are struggling to get all this data together that is clean. Then they spend a lot of time in manual work just cleaning data and then digging out the insights that are going to make them relevant to the business. So oftentimes you've heard about finance as the scorekeeper, the bookkeeper, the back office function, always late with a report. Nobody really cares about. It's only financial information. With Abacum, we bring all these dispersed systems into a single source of truth, right? So you have all the accounting data, but also all the operational KPIs that matter to the business, always clean in real time for finance to analyze. And with that, we enable them to automate the reporting that is relevant to the board of directors, the management team, the different stakeholders like sales or marketing so they can drive business outcomes. They can provide the information that matters when it matters, right? Different scenarios, oh, what's going to happen with interest rates? What's going to happen with international trade? Incorporating those scenarios into decision-making. So the post is clean data insights when it matters and definitely finance in the driver's seat of the business.
Gemma Allen
>> So are you competing predominantly with Excel and legacy thinking and behavior patterns that have been built over decades or are you competing with other SaaS players? Who's the core competitor for this? Who you're trying to take out?
Julio Martínez
>> Yeah. So think of Adaptive Insights now acquired by Workday. Think of some other legacy players such as Anaplan or Planful, right? Very relevant SaaS businesses that were most of them founded 25 years ago, right? So they are actually pre-cloud, pre smartphones, and definitely pre-AI, right? We've emerged as the very clear leader of the AI-native solutions to bring the finance team to the AI world.
Gemma Allen
>> So you mentioned that there is an expectation now, a fast growing expectation, especially in the world of tokenomics and all of this financial mania that's happening around us and in tech that CFOs and financial teams become more strategic operators, right?
Julio Martínez
>> Yeah.
Gemma Allen
>> We've seen that happening across the business. To become a strategic operator, there are a certain level of insight, data, but also I guess repeatability and decision-making velocity needed, right?
Julio Martínez
>> Yeah.
Gemma Allen
>> That probably was that needed maybe five years ago.
Julio Martínez
>> Absolutely.
Gemma Allen
>> How are things shifting kind of week to week, month to month in this space? How are you building a system and a product, not just for next month, but for two years from now at a time where everything feels somewhat chaotic?
Julio Martínez
>> Yeah. So we are going through a tectonic shift movement, right? Everything feels that is changing very fast. Definitely AI has been a tailwind for us, right? Before us, maybe some of the legacy players still had a halo effect on their brand because they had been in the market for longer. Today, CFOs, VP of finance, VPs of FP&A are really looking to incorporate and embrace through AI technology into their workflows, right? So this has really catapulted us. To answer your questions, we continue hiring engineers and product managers and designers left and right. We've not only more than triple productivity, but engineer and that continues compounding, but we continue enhancing that team. We heavily invest in R&D when other players stall, right? They stopped investing in the product a long time ago and they're trying to milk the cow. So this is a big contrast. We continue shipping product every single day actually. So a data point for me is that this quarter, our average is 21 PRs every day, every single day. So this is the level of innovation that we are bringing to the market. At a point in time, to your point, expectations on CFOs are through the roof.
Gemma Allen
>> For sure.
Julio Martínez
>> Think of it. Everybody's looking at them, they're on the spotlight and they are being looked at as how are you incorporating AI to drive performance, to drive productivity, to enhance efficiency in the business? And they need to deliver answers now.
Gemma Allen
>> I think FinTech in general has been a fast adopter of AI, right? We've seen a lot of companies make a lot of progress in a very short space of time in the space. There's this counter argument that AI is making everyone Harry Potter. We're all suddenly wizards and we can do all sorts of stuff for ourselves. Vibe coding solutions, et cetera, et cetera. When it comes to the world of FP&A though, which is so incredibly clinical by design and by necessity, what are your thoughts when people say, "Well, five years from now, ChatGPT or Claude or whatever will be vibe coding all this for CFOs." What do you respond to that with?
Julio Martínez
>> Yeah, I love this provocation, right? And I think that hey, spreadsheets and Claude or spreadsheets and any given LLM, I think they have a place in the market, right? There are a lot of SMBs that they probably don't need FP&A software because their business complexity is not very high. And hey, a smarter spreadsheets on a spreadsheet with an LLM, it's good for them. Now at some point in time, that business complexity increases to a point where that solution no longer holds, right? So the point of spreadsheets plus an LLM starts to break at some point in time and I'll explain where. Also vibe coding a solution. Look, the provocation I always bring back to that point is, hey, we are extremely focused on building the best financial planning and analysis platform for the market. If on top of that, now I need to build a CRM, an HIRS and a hiring software, an ERP for accounting, and I look at my list of vendors, probably we have 100 vendors that we buy software from. What do I need to hire now? 100 more engineers to build all of those solutions or will I rely on a vendor that has made their obsession to build the best solution for me, right? So I think that we are living on the moment where there is a little bit too much hype in the SaaSpocalypse. I think there is a market for all of us, particularly on FP&A. Heck, FP&A is not only about the data. You need to have a good number of integrations. You need to clean the data with AI. You want to build the model and the business logic. You need collaborative workflows with a human in the loop for approvals. You need governance and security and scalability in data. And then on top of that, that gives you the foundation and the framework to 10X your outcomes with AI. AI on top of a weak foundation doesn't really bring you anywhere.
Gemma Allen
>> No. Talk about the technology itself. Go under the hood for a second.
Julio Martínez
>> Yeah.
Gemma Allen
>> How proprietary is this? How much of it is built on another frontier model? And how do you and any FinTech founder, Julio, I think about this a lot, manage your own tokenomics and your own FP&A when things are again in this AI economy seems to be moving so quickly and the costs seem to be spiraling in only one direction?
Julio Martínez
>> Yeah. So the cost is spiraling for us and for everybody. So we'll need to learn how to address that. But if we look under the hood, look, being AI-native is very real. There are a lot of players that are sprinkling AI on top of rigid architectures that were built pre-cloud actually. What does that mean? In our case, for instance, we leverage AI from the data ingestion throughout the data cleaning. So AI and actually machine learning is used to clean the data and normalize the data. Actually, legacy players and many players out there use old relational databases, relational schemas, all app cubes to hold their data. That is not efficient at all for AI, right? Being AI-native in our case is having, for instance, knowledge graphs, knowledge schemas that allow AI ... That are optimized for AI to read and it's machine readable as we call it from the beginning. So you are building your architecture from the ground up knowing that it needs to be massively consumed by LLMs and not all the LLMs. And now to your point on tokens, we make the consumption of LLMs very efficient because honestly, the latest LLM might be an overkill for certain use cases. Certain use cases are going to deliver the same result with traditional ML or with a very cheap LLM, right? And then we channel those use cases through those cheaper options. So the consumption is more efficient, but then some other use cases might require the latest Opus 4.8, right? But then we enable, we orchestrate the LLMs and the technology so that it becomes very efficient for our customers and they don't need to be all the time at the cutting edge testing the latest one and how to optimize for token consumption.
Gemma Allen
>> That's so interesting, I guess, because there is so many substrates of this, right? When you take these workflows apart and you don't necessarily need a Ferrari to replace a Toyota in certain elements of that stock, right? So it's so true. So Julio, you're here this week because Females in Finance Collective is having a three year celebration here at the NYSE on Thursday and I know you're a key partner of theirs.
Julio Martínez
>> Yeah.
Gemma Allen
>> Talk me through though I guess two sides of this, the relationship with FIF, but also your own journey because this company's five years old, 2021, interesting time, right? ChatGPT and also a massive spike in interest rates. In some respects, you have great foresight in creating a FinTech company targeting CFOs. But what has the journey been like for you in terms of building community here in New York and talk a little bit about, I guess, FIF and how you also bring a product like this to market as a Spanish man moving to New York.
Julio Martínez
>> Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Gemma, thank you so much for this question. First, we are super proud partners of FIF, right? I think the work that FIF and Megan are doing in the community is so formidable. I think, hey, the best community out there and also as a proud father of two daughters, we definitely want to see that momentum of women taking the top place in finance. So really very proud sponsors and partners in the community and we'll do our best always to support those efforts. My personal journey, I'm a finance professional that moved into technology. So I spent close to 17 years in investment banking in New York, São Paulo, Zurich, London, different geographies. I was given an awesome opportunity to start building products. So I became a product guy for four years and then at some point I connected the dots. "Hey, the problem and space I understand the best is FP&A corporate finance, but I know how to build technology now." And I had been exposed to some of the legacy systems during my career. I used some of those legacy systems and I arrived to the conclusion, "Hey, we can generate a 20X experience." So yeah, I decided to leave everything. I launched the business in the middle of COVID, in the middle of interest rates spiking, which didn't make it any easy to be very honest.
Gemma Allen
>> It made your pitch easier though, right? Because I think a lot of CFOs were like, "Crap, I really need to be ahead on this. I need these numbers to be as accurate as they can be," right?
Julio Martínez
>> Totally. You got me there. So yeah, definitely at a point in time where they were craving for scenarios and some more technology to grow efficiently. Then yeah, from the get go, we went through Y Combinator, we've raised over 100 million. So really winning in the market. We are also very efficient. So we follow our own pitch. So we are a company that really praises itself for having the strongest efficiency metrics in the sector and the strongest retention, customer retention in the sector. So yeah.
Gemma Allen
>> Talk about the fundamentals of Y Combinator. If you were to think life before and after, what do you think the synthesis is? What did it really give you?
Julio Martínez
>> Yeah. First, brand recognition, right? We launched the business in the U.S., obviously a huge market, but that was before some of our excellent fans backed us. We were basically unknown and we were targeting small enterprises from the get go. So they look at you like, can I really trust you with a mission critical software? So Y Combinator really offered us that brand recognition? Okay, maybe it made those conversations a bit easier. Obviously the product had to be there.
Gemma Allen
>> of legitimacy, right? For sure.
Julio Martínez
>> Yes.
Gemma Allen
>> Yeah.
Julio Martínez
>> That was the key component. I also want to mention some of those partners are so good. They have been empires. They have built formidable companies and then working with some of those partners that are known to be very hard and then they hit you hard in those office hours, but we learned so much about company building and growing fast and it was an awesome experience.
Gemma Allen
>> Wow. Okay. So Julio, what's ahead? Do you think you guys have raised a series B? Am I correct?
Julio Martínez
>> Yes.
Gemma Allen
>> Where do you go from here? What does the next 12 months look like for you and the team?
Julio Martínez
>> Yeah. So we'll continue our journey of continue growing very fast. We are today the fastest growing financial planning and analysis platform in the market. We continue moving and gaining more business in the enterprise. We'll be raising more capital as it looks like. There is a lot of excitement in the market about us, about the asset, and we feel very privileged. We are growing the team. We have customers in more than 40 countries. We did our company offsite last week and I came to realize, wow, we have teammates from 28 nationalities. So that got me very excited. We are proud of being multicultural and we'll continue going in that direction. In terms of product roadmap, more AI for our customers. It's the most exciting time to be building technology I've ever been. I'm on the senior side of many founders I know and I have to say that it's never been more exciting.
Gemma Allen
>> Well, I hope like many of the Spaniards I know, it also involves a couple of weeks of downtime in Spain in August with your family.
Julio Martínez
>> Absolutely. Absolutely.
Gemma Allen
>> Okay. Thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE.
Julio Martínez
>> Gemma, thank you so much for having me.
Gemma Allen
>> I'm Gemma Allen coming to you from theCUBE Studio at the NYSE. This is Mixture of Experts, one of our programs with NYSE Wired. Thanks for watching.
Dave Vellante
John Furrier
Gemma Allen