In this theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Mixture of Experts segment from the New York Stock Exchange, theCUBE’s John Furrier sits down with Raj Verma, CEO of SingleStore, to unpack how the intersection of technology and finance is shaping enterprise strategy. Verma shares why SingleStore is “on course” for the public markets, reflects on brand-building through the company’s partnership with golf Hall of Famer Padraig Harrington and connects that ethos to how SingleStore helps organizations fix struggling data “swings.” The discussion zeroes in on what’s next as Wall Street watches the AI infrastructure buildout: after chips and systems, the software and data layers set the pace for value creation.
Verma outlines why enterprises must modernize “brown” data estates into “green” ones to safely bring corporate context, governance and compliance into LLM workflows via RAG – and why commoditized data-at-rest puts the advantage at the query layer that unifies data in motion with data at rest. He predicts agentic AI will gain reasoning capabilities in roughly 18 months, cites industry indicators like Google reporting ~25% of its software now built by AI and argues that high switching costs will give way to disruption as buyers reassess legacy vendors. The conversation closes with concrete momentum: ~33% YoY growth, ARR in the ~$135M range, gross dollar retention ~98%, cloud NDR ~130, ~50% of business now in the cloud, landing ~3 new customers per day, a path to cash-flow breakeven in the next two quarters and a teaser for AI-related announcements in the next two months. Listeners will find notable stats, real-world use cases and forward-looking views on how databases power reliable AI at enterprise scale.
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In this interview from theCUBE + NYSE Wired’s Mixture of Experts series, Rebecca Schwartz, co-founder of Tabs, sits down with theCUBE’s John Furrier to discuss how vertical AI is revolutionizing the office of the CFO. Fresh off a $55 million Series B funding round led by Lightspeed, Schwartz details how Tabs is automating complex billing and revenue processes to eliminate "spreadsheet hell." The conversation explores the shift toward AI-driven workflows that ingest B2B contracts, streamline collections and provide a unified "commercial graph" for financial da...Read more
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What is the context of the discussion taking place in theCUBE studio?add
What recent funding announcement was made by Tabs, and who were the investors involved?add
What are the most painful workflows in the office of the CFO that can be improved with AI?add
>> Welcome back everyone. I'm John Furrier, you host of theCUBE. we are here at our NYSC CUBE Studio on the East Coast. Of course, we have our West Coast in Palo Alto Studio connecting Silicon Valley and Wall Street. As the world start to expand, tech is everywhere, New York and Silicon Valley is an access point on both hubs here for theCUBE, of course, we go to all the events. This is our Mixture of Expert series, we're bringing leaders, experts in their field talking about what they're doing. Obviously the AI wave, AI factories, robotics, all things data with AI is creating great magical new ways to compete on value. Rebecca Schwartz, co-founder of Tabs, is here, fresh off a big funding announcement. Rebecca, thank you for coming into theCUBE. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.All right, so first of all, you heard my little monologue there. The AI is data-driven, domain expertise, that's kind of the key indicators. We've been saying that on theCUBE for years. You guys have big news last week, funding, how much, who's involved? Give us the data.
Rebecca Schwartz
>> Yeah, thanks. An exciting series B, $55 million led by Lightspeed with support from General Catalyst and Primary Venture Partners. We've been very lucky to have great investor support since the beginning.>> Those are big names, General Catalyst, Lightspeed, they are very finicky investors. They love scale, they love good numbers, unit economics. That's a high bar, so congratulations. Explain what you guys do, it's a very interesting story. I like the story because it fits the mold of what I see as the scalable model in AI, it's not the big language models all the time that are going to be winning, there's a power law of value. Explain what you guys do.
Rebecca Schwartz
>> Absolutely, we're big believers in what vertical AI is going to be able to do. So Tabs is the first AI need of billing and revenue platform. We support CFOs and accounting leaders at growth stage companies taking all of their billing and revenue processes off their plate, leveraging AI to help with ingesting B2B contracts, supporting billing and collections, and basically taking over the entire AR process to really accelerate collections. Cash is king right now and revenue reporting and compliance are a big part of that as well.>> Yeah, one of the themes that people know from theCUBE, our commentary has always been, what's your mode? That's always been the question for every company. And in AI, workflows and data are huge. Okay, of course scale-
Rebecca Schwartz
>> Absolutely.... >> but not every company can spend 20 billion on CapEx. Yeah, they'll go to the cloud, they'll use on-prem stuff, but you're serving companies that have back office known process money.
Rebecca Schwartz
>> Absolutely.>> Money's money. Money's... Every day, it's in someone's pocket. Take us through that because I think you guys illustrate to me an illustration of what success looks like because you don't have to be that big LLM. You guys nailed a vertical problem quantifiable, so that's value.
Rebecca Schwartz
>> Yeah, absolutely.>> Take us through specifically the workflows and the problem you solved.
Rebecca Schwartz
>> You're exactly right, John. So we're thinking a lot about what are the most painful workflows in the office of the CFO today that are either extremely manual, that create a lot of human error, where there's a lot of headcount needs both in-house and outsourced, and where frankly the burden falls to people to do really rote manual tasks, and a big piece of that is in the billing and revenue process where companies are either delayed in sending out invoices, they're delayed in their follow-ups, they're not collecting on time, and their revenue reporting falls short because they don't have the headcount to keep up and so the process falls by the wayside. We're big believers that this is an awesome application for AI. It's AI with a real use case in mind, which is how do we start to revolutionize the office of the CFO by bringing superpowers to finance and accounting folks who can start to do more strategic and in-depth value-added work if they're not spending time on a lot of data entry.>> I'll share kind of a side anecdote for you. We had last year, or this year I should say, we had an event in Palo Alto called, CFO and AI. We thought, "Okay, hey, we'll see what's out there." More and more CFOs that I was interviewing really wanted to learn about it, but there's no event, there's no way for them to understand it. And I realized that one, they have a lot of data and process, which you're crushing, but also they have to operate the business. And CFOs are like the architects of the business model, they have to track the money, cost expenses, revenue expenses, profit, and there's a lot of decisions, do I spend CapEx? Do I do OpEx? So AI has kind of been forced on the CFO in a big way. And where's the YouTube video for that? Where's the CFO AI 101? What's your reaction to that?
Rebecca Schwartz
>> Yeah, A big part of what we're thinking about is all of these other functional groups are coming to CFOs asking for AI investment, engineers are using AI coding tools, go-to-market teams are looking at AI applications, whether it's for your outbound marketing function, your BDR team, your sales function. We would talk to those same CFOs who are busy signing off on vendor contracts for other parts of their organization, and you'd ask them how are they thinking about using AI? And they were behind. They were not thinking about, how is AI going to change my team's job? How can I make accounting better? How can I make FP&A better? And so we're really laser-focused on one specific workflow across AR and revenue that we think is a prime application for AI. For CFOs who know, they need to think ahead, they're building products that have AI in them at their own companies, and they need to be thinking about AI use cases themselves.>> Rebecca, what use cases are you honing in on specifically?
Rebecca Schwartz
>> Yeah, so we take your B2B contract, as soon as you close a deal with your customer, we extract all of the data from that contract using LLMs to create structure and organization in our system that has a good understanding of what the customer/commercial relationship is, that's what we would call our commercial graphs. And then we support the creation of invoice calculations and revenue schedules based on that, so it used to be work that most people were doing by hand in spreadsheets, and then we facilitate the entire actual workflow around sending and collecting on those invoices to pull cash in faster.>> Yeah, I mean you are actually creating efficiencies that help them. And I was talking to a CFO a couple months ago and the conversation went like this. "Our GNA bloated from two percent to eight." And so that's where they go first to cut. We're going to trim, they were growing, but because they grew their operations on the G&A side, whatever you want to call it, admin, it bloated, but it was because they were growing. So you had a growth mode and they're like, "I don't get the cutting." So what it was was overhead on labor.
Rebecca Schwartz
>> Absolutely.>> And labor, that was very ephemeral. Contractors coming in, leaving in and out. One, you had turnover delay errors.
Rebecca Schwartz
>> Yeah, low quality of life in those roles. We see AR professionals being the biggest bucket within the accounting function, it is directly scalable as the business grows and so you have this exponential head count growth for more and more folks doing menial work. We talk to teams all the time with dozens of folks in billing and AR clerks who are experienced accountants who could be doing much more sophisticated work, and we can really give them more intelligence and superpowers to be able to do their jobs better.>> So it's a great example of what you're doing is it keeps them lean and more productive.
Rebecca Schwartz
>> Absolutely.>> That's the use case of AI.
Rebecca Schwartz
>> Absolutely. Especially early stage companies. At Tabs, we have folks doing hundreds of millions in revenue with a single accountant on the team who becomes the master of Tabs as a way to drive both automated workflows and AI agents to do the work that historically a team of four or five, six would've had to do.>> So a good funding B round, that's a solid number, good investors. Talk about the origination, how did you get here? Did you wake up one day say, "Hey, I'm going to focus on this core problem." Or was it intentional, they say, "Hey, we're going to go get a small piece of the market and expand from there," what's the-
Rebecca Schwartz
>> Yeah, great question. Really, the thesis for the company was born around this idea that other parts of the CFO's tech stack had really emerged with really good platform technology. We had seen great players on the AP and spend side of the house. We saw a ramp in HRS and payroll. You see companies like Rippling where CFO's were really happy with their software choices. And when you ask them about how they're doing billing and revenue, it was point solutions, piecemeal, custom-built software, a lot of spreadsheet work, and a lot of human capital, so it really felt like a ripe opportunity to rethink how that process was happening. And we started the company right as GPT was sort of emergent, and it really felt like a perfect application for AI to think first principles about what the workflow would be.>> So an easy white space to identify. An underserved-
>> Low NPS products on the market where there was an opportunity to rethink how legacy software was being built.>> All right, talk about some of the momentum and numbers we can share, as much as you can, give us a feeling for the scope of the growth.
Rebecca Schwartz
>> Yeah, absolutely. So we're about 90 FTEs now, it's about triple since the start of the year, serving hundreds of customers. Our whole team is based right here in New York and super excited for big revenue growth ahead.>> Where's the office in New York?
Rebecca Schwartz
>> So we're opening up a new AI office in Soho in a couple of weeks. So we're really excited. We have our entire staff, every engineer, every support person, all working out of the same office here in Manhattan.>> We'll have to do a flyby and check it out,
Rebecca Schwartz
>> Absolutely, would love to have you.>> All right, so what are you recruiting for? I'm sure getting a lot of resumes.
Rebecca Schwartz
>> Yes.>> What's the culture like? What kind of talent are you looking for? Take a minute to plug in.
Rebecca Schwartz
>> Yeah, absolutely. So on the product and engineering side, making big investments in our applied AI team, just really laser focused on all of the different AI applications within the platform. So continuing to hire really good talent there. Because we serve accounting and finance, those specialty domain areas are really important to what we do, so we're continuing to bring on actually industry practitioners, big four accountants or recovering big four accountants, whether that's in our solutions consulting function, implementation, customer success, and then marketing and sales. A lot of growth goals ahead.>> So your primary target audience's persona is CFOs?
Rebecca Schwartz
>> CFOs and the controllers who work under them.>> All right. So what does the day in the life look like for a CFO before Tabs and after Tabs? I got kind of a taste of spreadsheets, we can maybe just say spreadsheet hell, what is the alternative? What's the old way, new way picture look like?
Rebecca Schwartz
>> Totally. I'll give you one example that I often comes up for the CFOs that we work with. In prior state, they would have an upcoming board meeting and they would need to triangulate data on collections and cashflow forecasting, reporting on ARR or contracted ARR, gap revenue, and these were all coming from disparate sources. So you have data in your CRM, what the sales team thinks closed, you've got actual customer contracts, who knows what's in those. You've got some sort of revenue reporting out of a spreadsheet. You've got cashflow forecasting and a pivot table somewhere else and then you've got your accounting system data from...>> So the data wrangling problem-
Rebecca Schwartz
>> A huge issue.... >> a source of truth problem.
Rebecca Schwartz
>> Exactly.>> Of course the sales guy's, "Oh, everything's closing this month." And then if it's closed, where are we in the... Is it 90 days? COVID, everyone went to 60/90, now you're seeing radical terms.
Rebecca Schwartz
>> What are the net terms, what's the pricing model? Hey, do we have a usage based pricing model? Who's tracking the usage to make that .>> What about revenue recognition?
Rebecca Schwartz
>> Absolutely.>> All those are like, are we on ARR? Is it-
Rebecca Schwartz
>> Exactly, we have an amendment. Now we are changing the contract mid-cycle. Who's tracking that? So that's the problem that Tabs is here to solved.>> Does it cross-connected compensation, too, systems?
Rebecca Schwartz
>> Absolutely. So we push data back into the CRM so that the sales team has access to understand what's happening with the financials of the customers they support, and that plays a big role in commissions. They want to know, did the invoice go out? Has it been paid? Because that impacts how they get paid.>> One of the things that comes up with CFOs with AI and other examples we've highlighted on theCUBE is once they discover it opens up new windows of opportunity. For example, they go, "Wow, if I do this, then they can do something." Once you're in the game... When I think about cash flow, I think about, for me, enterprise value.
Rebecca Schwartz
>> Absolutely.>> Enterprise value is completely based on cash flow. So if I want to go and do a finance thing, and I want to do it in a discounted cash flow, I got to have accurate numbers. I'm just making this up, I'm riffing on, but you got the idea. So I'd never know that if I don't have a source of truth.
Rebecca Schwartz
>> Absolutely, and what is the insights-driven cash flow forecast for, if I send these invoices on time and I get paid on time, what is the forecast I can expect? And then by the same token, if I don't get paid on time, how do I understand this customer's typical payment behavior so I have a more accurate picture of when that cash is going to come in the door?>> All right, if I asked 10 of your customers, 10 out of 10 CFOs recommend Tabs, what would they say? What would be some anecdotal comments? "We can't live without Tabs." Well, give us a taste of the excitement level.
Rebecca Schwartz
>> They would say, we have the most flexible revenue system that can handle any pricing model or flexible architecture that their sales team comes up with in contracts. What that allows is for them to have the most accurate billing and revenue system and drive really, really cohesive reporting.>> How has been the second order of magnitude effects been on the sales side? Because all the go-to-market strategies any company will have is sometimes complicated, but it depends on the company, so it depends. What's the go-to-market side impact there? What's been some of the results there?
Rebecca Schwartz
>> Yeah. We hear all the time that finance teams want to be the team of yes for their commercial teams and when their systems don't allow flexibility, they don't have the tools to say yes that they want to have. And so what this really unlocks is experimentation and pricing model. Everyone's exploring usage and consumption models, especially in AI right now, so we're driving new types of pricing. And I think in that, CFOs are sort of being asked help->> They're more team players.
Rebecca Schwartz
>> Yes.>> They're liked more.
Rebecca Schwartz
>> Absolutely. And they->> There's always been tension between sales and CFOs. I mean, I was at many companies where it's like, "Why is the..." They're in different buildings in sales because they speak different languages, but here you bring them together.
Rebecca Schwartz
>> Absolutely. And in this moment of pricing model evolution, they need to be working on the same team and we are giving the CFOs the toolkit to help be team players with their sales team.>> Well, that's consistent with our CFO that we have because one of the things that came up was, AI is impacting our business model and they've always been, what's the CFO do for the business for the AI," like buying, procuring, to, what's AI do for the CFO? So you've kind of flipped it.
Rebecca Schwartz
>> Yeah, I would say it's both. We are AI native in our approach at Tabs to delivering software, but we are also serving CFOs who are thinking deeply about AI in their own business models as well.>> Okay. So final question, Rebecca, what's on your to-do list? Obviously you've got the product initiatives. What are you working on? What are some of the growth initiatives, product, new features? What are some of the things you guys are thinking about?
Rebecca Schwartz
>> Yeah, absolutely. Two-fold, really, continuing to harden our platform. We are going deeper and deeper in functionality areas where folks are pushing us for more customization. We're going up market quite a bit, serving larger and larger customers who come with their own flavors of how they want the software to work. So we're continuing to invest in more and more customizability and configurability of the software.>> Integration deals?
Rebecca Schwartz
>> Integrations, more integrations and more flexibility in how those get set up so that we can create really the rail tracks for AI to do its job across a wider and wider surface area. So typical plugins for us, your CRM, your ERP, your tax system, payments providers, BI tools, FP&A tools. So we really want to plug into the broadest possible surface area.>> Okay, one more question because it just popped in my head. You mentioned about a graph, what was it called?
Rebecca Schwartz
>> Commercial graph.>> Commercial graph. Explain what a commercial graph is.
Rebecca Schwartz
>> Yes, so if you think about every data input around the customer's financial relationship with you, whether that's your contract with them, your CRM data, invoices, revenue data, actual cash receipts, usage data is becoming a really big part of that as well, to understand their variable usage and consumption of your platform and how that translates into financials. We are parsing that all together and creating a really organized and holistic view of each individual customer so that it is no longer CSI to figure out how is this being managed across multiple pieces of software.>> And you're actually putting that in a graph database?
Rebecca Schwartz
>> Absolutely. And that's where a lot of our AI generates so that we can drive better and better insights.>> And AI loves graphs.
Rebecca Schwartz
>> Loves.>> Rebecca, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, I appreciate the-
Rebecca Schwartz
>> Thanks for having me.... >> highlighting. Domain expertise, targeted intentional use cases really are the key to success in this market. There's white space opportunities everywhere. And of course once you land, you can expand. Of course, we're doing our best to land and expand here on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.
