Company Size & Timeframe

  • Industry: Artificial Intelligence (AI) software
  • Size: 5-year-old company, $65M in VC financing; created a powerful platform technology but still had not gone to market with products. 40 employees.
  • Other description: during the assignment the company had recently transitioned from central HQ one office to a fully distributed-virtual team structure due to COVID.

Results

  • The spinoff adventure was properly reclassified and reabsorbed
  • A company formation restructuring, planning and execution, was successfully completed
  • The finance and admin department became primarily automated (Quickbooks, Bill.com, Expensify, an accounting firm to help the COO were all launched)
  • $20M in financing was raised (by the current investors in the end)
  • Provided the revenue recognition for 2020 for the SaaS software and services sales

Company Profile & Position

  • Position: Fractional CFO
  • 7 months heavy, ranging from 2 to 3 days per week to 6 days per week
  • 5 months light, ranging from zero days per week to 2 to 3 days per week

Situation

  • EC needed to change reverse its path with the spinoff company, and instead reabsorb it. Yet still there was a need for managerial accounting for the Back2Work product line.
  • EC needed to transition from an LLC partnership formation to a DE Corp, including converting all shareholders (I was the first to point this out and helped champion the project)
  • Accounting was mostly done by spreadsheets, it needed to be professionalized and ready for investor penetration
  • Admin and accounting activities needed automation rather than mostly manual tracking
  • A financial model was needed for investor financing, and a business plan– including tying up a comprehensive strategy

Implementation

  • A plan to reabsorb the spinoff company was proposed, accepted, and executed
  • A custom chart of accounts was implemented, including bridging the spending from the spinoff company back to unified accounting tallies
  • An outsourced accounting firm was launched, all past spending and all financial transactions were coded into a Quickbook-based accounting system (with a custom front end), and systems (Bills.com and Expensify) were integrated to further automate and self-empower the employee base
  • Contributed to the strategy formation and go to market plans, even acting as a product manager for a short period of time and providing impactful strategy and/or research briefs
  • Created a detailed pro forma financial model, helped with putting together all the investor materials, developed a group of comparable companies for modeling and comparison
  • Analyzed and advised on company valuation report used for financing and equity conversions
  • Delivered a well-researched report on the top VCs, firm and partner, for EC’s next $70M financing in late 2022

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