AI-for-Excel firm Tracelight raises $3.6m to streamline finance work
UK founded AI company, Tracelight, has raised over $3m in seed funding as it bids to hand laborious finance work over to AI tech.
The London based company raised $3.6m (£2.7m) in seed funding from a series of venture capital firms, led by Chalfen Ventures with participation from Acequia Capital, Inovo and EF City PM can reveal.
Angel investors included Charlie Songhurst and Suhit Gupta.
It is Tracelight’s latest step in its efforts to reduce the amount of time analysts spend working on complex financial models and Excel spreadsheets.
The money raised will go towards building Tracelight’s AI product, expanding its team and increasing its distribution to finance and strategy professionals.
Reduce complexity
Tracelight’s AI engine works to reduce the complexity faced by Excel users by acting as a translator.
It turns spreadsheet logic into an understandable format for large language models (LLMs), which process human language.
Tracelight CEO and founder Peter Fuller said, “Excel financial models underpin all of the corporate world’s most important decisions.”
“Our aim is to take away the entire mechanical workload of financial modelling.”
The engine claims to be able to check formulas for logical errors, preventing inaccurate data from slipping through the cracks and also carry out repeat analysis, such as updating models with new financial results.
Tapping into a new sector
The tech taps into a sector which has been largely untouched by AI’s growing influence, with Tracelight acknowledging financial models “have barely evolved in decades”.
Aleksander Misztal, co-founder and CTO of Tracelight said, “The financial models used…are large, logically complex and formatted to strict rules.”
But the call for the use of AI in financial models has increased in recent years, with many tech startups, including Tracelight, preparing to unseat the traditional methods.
Misztal said, “For the first time Excel financial modellers will be able to tap into the power of frontier AI models directly in their existing workflow.”
Since the company’s launch, Tracelight has gained early traction amongst analysts, investment banks and leading professional service firms.
Early users of the engine have reported saving time on “laborious” tasks, such as building common analyses, formatting and finding errors in spreadsheets.