DataSnipper, a leading intelligent automation platform for audit and finance professionals, has raised a €92 million Series B, led by Index Ventures, at a valuation of $1 billion – solidifying the company’s mission to empower auditors with AI, after a record year of doubling its customer base and revenue. The Series B follows an investment by Insight Partners in September 2022.
Audit is a bedrock of the global economy, powering growth by creating confidence in the truth of financial data worldwide. It’s not a sector so much as a universal workflow, something that happens inside and outside of all companies.
“Half the world is creating more data than ever before, half the world needs to verify it – that’s the premise of the entire economy,” said DataSnipper CEO Vidya Peters. “DataSnipper lies at the intersection,” Peters added that using DataSnipper’s tool, auditors can automate away up to 90% of menial tasks and boost business growth by cutting costs in half.
Founded in 2017, DataSnipper has more than doubled its revenue several years in a row. It serves more than 400,000 auditors across 125 countries – including leading brands such as Deloitte, KPMG, Ernst & Young and PwC. While its core market is currently external audit – the firms that check company accounts – the new funding will help DataSnipper expand across new verticals including internal auditors, tax advisors, forensic accountants, and other sectors involving data reconciliation. DataSnipper already counts Hilton, Siemens, Frontier Airlines and the Government of Queensland as customers in these segments, and the company is also accelerating rapidly across the Asia-Pacific and Latin American markets.
DataSnipper has recently released new product suites to better serve finance professionals across diverse sectors. Its Cloud Collaboration Suite allows for secure and seamless real-time coordination across distributed teams, while its AI Suite allows users to ask questions in natural language, and then automatically analyze and surface insights from any unstructured documents and data.
A key feature driving DataSnipper’s adoption among external auditors is that the sector is coming under historic pressure. Regulation and scrutiny of audit have deepened following high-profile accounting scandals, leading to calls for greater competition in the sector. Meanwhile, companies are producing exponentially more data.
Together, these trends have created pain and bottlenecks as auditors struggle to manually comb through documents and reconcile endless streams of information. The result is that auditors are churning out of the profession in record numbers: around 1 in 5 auditors quit their job every year, 80% of auditors will leave their company within 5 years, and as many as 82%% of auditors with 6 or more years of experience will leave the profession within a year.
DataSnipper’s AI-powered platform addresses the root causes of auditor burnout by bringing efficiency and delight to the process of audit. The platform embeds automation directly into Excel, eliminating crushing manual work by letting auditors simply ‘snip’ numbers from any file, such as an invoice, bank statement or inventory document. These ‘snips’ automatically reconcile against transactions, creating airtight audit trails with a click. What was once the work of hours is now a matter of seconds, freeing auditors from drudgery to focus on strategic insights. By meeting auditors where they work, and then leveraging AI to amplify their expertise, DataSnipper helps to inject collaboration and dynamism back into a profession that’s losing talent to tedium.
“DataSnipper lies at the intersection of macro trends shaping audit – ballooning regulation, talent churn and pent-up pressure for challenger firms beyond the Big Four,” commented Hannah Seal, partner at Index Ventures who led the round and will join the board. “It’s not a technology in search of a use-case – it’s a profound unmet need among auditors and finance teams. DataSnipper’s growth into new sectors comes directly from user demand, as professionals keep asking for the product once they experience how fast and delightful it is. By starting from auditors’ Excel workflows rather than forcing them to migrate to a new platform, adoption is rapid and loyalty is fanatical. We’re thrilled to be backing Vidya and the whole team as they scale globally.”
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2024/02/amsterdam-based-datasnipper-bags-e92-million-series-b-to-take-ai-to-the-auditors-arena/
