London-based Causal, a collaborative platform for financial modelling, has announced that it has secured $20 million in Series A funding.
Who invested in Causal?
The investment round was led by Coatue (that invested in Ramp and Linktree among others) and Accel alongside support from FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (the richest man in cryptocurrency).
The round also involved participation from a slew of high-profile angel investors including Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, Notion COO Akshay Kothari and Brex CRO Sam Blond. Existing investors include AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant and Adobe CPO Scott Belsky.
Previously, the company raised $4.2 million in seed funding. Causal’s latest investment follows its rapid growth. The company added 30% more customers month-on-month last year.
Also, the startup is hiring rapidly and plans to grow its team from 12 employees to 50 globally by the end of 2022. The funds will be used to develop its financial modelling platform.
Taimur Abdaal co-founder of Causal said: “Despite being used every day across the globe, spreadsheets haven’t fundamentally evolved over the past 40 years. Spreadsheet models are hard to build and maintain, disconnected from the rest of a company’s tech stack, and actively hinder collaboration across teams. We’re building a next-generation tool to solve these problems, and are delighted that Coatue and Accel have led our Series A to take the company into the next stage of growth.”
David Cahn, partner at Coatue, said: “From the moment I started working with Taimur, Lukas and the team at Causal, I could tell that they understood the problems that companies face when it comes to relying on spreadsheets siloed in the finance team. We think they have a novel product that’s going to make number-crunching fast, collaborative, and accessible. I’m looking forward to working closely with the team.”
Spreadsheet-killer!
Founded in 2019 by Taimur Abdaal and Lukas Köbis, Causal is a collaborative modelling platform, which aims to replace clunky and outdated traditional spreadsheets worldwide. Its product was born out of a frustration with the lack of collaboration options available to those working with financial models.
They found that companies were relying on spreadsheets while only a few people within the business truly understood how to use them. Also, they realised that it is time consuming. The major downside addressed by the spreadsheet killer Causal is the presence of only a few ways to collaborate and present spreadsheets to stakeholders in real-time.
The co-founders of Causal came up with the tool that empowers anyone in a company to build, share, and understand financial models that drive their business decisions.
Causal’s vision is to democratise business planning and make it accessible to every team in a company.
Use cases of Causal
Causal lets users create cloud-based financial models, connect them directly to live data wherever it’s stored, and share them through interactive dashboards with beautiful visuals. Furthermore, Causal lets users write formulas in English so that teams can easily understand each other’s work.
One of Causal’s unique features is the ability to create stunning visuals in a single click without spending hours on customisation and configuration.
The finance teams, marketing teams, and sales teams of a business use Causal for various purposes. Also, non-profits use it to calculate the impact of their work. Also, crypto companies model the economics of their tokens in Causal.
Causal has an extensive ecosystem of training resources including a documentation library, video courses, and an online forum. For enterprise customers, Causal’s in-house financial modelling provides hands-on help implementing the tool, as well as one-on-one training and support.
