Futrli - Forecasting for (small) business

An investment in Futrli's (business) forecasting software

We hear from Camilla Mazzolini, Investor at firstminute Capital, who explains why her VC firm made an investment in Series A funding for Futrli. Read the original article on LinkedIn.

At firstminute, we’re thrilled to announce our investment in Futrli as part of a £4m round alongside our friends from e.ventures and Notion Capital.

Futrli provides an all-in-one cloud-based accounting and forecasting platform for small businesses, and the accounting firms that support them. Futrli's financial forecasting helps (small) business owners understand their finances and improve their business plan. Looking at past and present data, Futrli shows its users a number of different insights and forecasts, eg cash flow projections or future sales.

The founder Hannah Dawson’s empathy for her users stems from the forecasting and accounting pains she experienced running her first business. Realizing she wasn’t alone in the need to be able to make decisions in real-time and to be able to see where your business is going, she drew on these experiences to revolutionize the way SMBs and accountants glean insights and plan for tomorrow. Today, Futrli is already supporting over 40,000 businesses and 1,100 accountants across 130 countries. Hannah’s infectious energy has helped to build an amazing team that has achieved all of this despite the business being bootstrapped prior to this raise.

Futrli is on a path to trailblaze a new software category, which they refer to as ‘Future Intelligence’. Business Intelligence looks to the past, but small business teams don’t have Enterprise business analysts to have to help them get on top of their numbers. To run a successful business irrespective of the size you have to know where you’re going. Small business teams just want to make decisions that affect their businesses today and tomorrow and then take the next obvious action. We believe this can be a category-defining SaaS platform.

Beyond small businesses, the Futrli team and platform work with accountants to help them become profitable in the advisory space: helping them create actionable business plans for their clients by taking those forecasting insights and facilitating informed decision-making. Futrli can do more than sales forecasting. Futrli can deliver and there is high demand. Forecasting can help accountants focus on what they are best at - delivering high-quality support to their clients.

Futrli is targeting the global SMB market of almost 55 million potential clients and a total addressable market of 3bn across the US, EU, and Oceania.

Unsurprisingly, Hannah is attracting a rockstar board. Giles Palmer, CEO of Brandwatch, has been appointed as Chairman, with firstminute’s Henry Lane Fox, Notion’s Jos White, and e.ventures’ Christian Miele joining as board members.