Mosaic Raises $18.5M Series A to Modernize CFO Software

Chief Financial Officers are often considered the most knowledgeable individuals within a company. While the Chief Executive Officer establishes the overall direction, communicates the vision, and shapes the company culture, the CFO requires a comprehensive understanding of all organizational activities. This includes pinpointing the sources of revenue and predicting when it will be received, calculating the costs associated with new personnel and their corresponding payment schedules, and devising effective cash flow management strategies, as well as identifying suitable debt instruments to address any financial gaps.

As businesses increasingly adopt cloud-based solutions, answering these questions has become more challenging, as various departments have begun to bypass the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system as the primary source of truth. Furthermore, CFOs are now expected to contribute more strategically to financial planning, but may encounter difficulties in delivering accurate forecasts and projections due to limited access to essential data. Just as Chief Marketing Officers have benefited from a new generation of marketing software over the past decade, shouldn’t CFOs have access to similar advanced tools?

Three former Palantir employees believe they have the answer, and have launched a new company called Mosaic. Mosaic is a “strategic finance platform” created to gather data from a wide range of enterprise IT systems – including ERPs, HRISs, and CRMs – and provide CFOs and their teams with the tools needed for more accurate and efficient strategic planning, forecasting, and prediction.

The company was founded in April 2019 by Bijan Moallemi, Brian Campbell, and Joe Garafalo, who collectively spent over 15 years working within the finance team at Palantir. During their time there, they witnessed the company’s growth from a small organization of just over one hundred people to a large enterprise with thousands of employees, serving more than one hundred customers and generating revenue from over a dozen countries, as demonstrated by Palantir’s IPO last year.

Effective financial management was crucial to Palantir’s success, but the existing software solutions were unable to keep pace with the company’s evolving needs. This led Palantir to develop its own internal tools. As Moallemi, now CEO of Mosaic, explained, they moved beyond simply “working in Excel, which is the standard tool for CFOs, and instead built a dedicated technical team to write code and create tools that would provide speed, access, trust, and visibility throughout the organization.”

Recognizing that most organizations lack the resources to dedicate technical talent to the CFO’s office, the three co-founders continued to explore ways to improve financial processes after leaving Palantir to pursue leadership roles at other companies – Moallemi at edtech startup Piazza, Campbell at litigation management startup Everlaw, and Garafalo at blockchain startup Axoni. They ultimately decided to replicate the success they experienced at Palantir by creating a robust software foundation for the CFO’s office across all companies. Moallemi noted that “the most significant advancements in the CFO’s office over the last decade have been the shift from desktop-based Excel to cloud-based Google Sheets.”

Mosaic’s goal is to rebuild the CFO software stack by creating a platform that serves as a central hub for company-wide financial discussions. While Mosaic concentrates on core finance functions like reporting and planning, it aims to broaden access to dashboards and forecasts, enabling greater transparency and facilitating feedback from across the organization to the CFO.

Several companies, including publicly traded Anaplan, have entered this market in recent years. Moallemi believes that existing solutions face a few key challenges that Mosaic is positioned to address. These include lengthy onboarding processes, which can take months for some companies as consultants integrate the software, the need for dedicated staff to maintain the tools, and limited visibility outside of the CFO’s office. Mosaic aims to offer immediate integration, broad organizational access, and minimal maintenance requirements.

“Everyone aspires to be strategic, but it’s difficult to achieve because a significant portion of time is spent extracting data from various systems, cleaning it, mapping it, and updating spreadsheets, leaving only a small percentage of time for analyzing the data and drawing meaningful insights,” Moallemi stated.

This is why Mosaic’s primary target customers are Series B and C-funded companies, which typically have their data readily available in accessible databases. The company initially focused on smaller businesses and, according to Moallemi, “has gradually expanded to work with larger, more complex clients over the past 12 months.” Currently, Mosaic has a team of 30 employees and generates revenues in the seven-figure range (without a dedicated sales team, as Moallemi indicated), although the company prefers not to disclose more specific figures.

The company’s growth and potential have attracted significant investor interest. Today, Mosaic announced that it has secured $18.5 million in Series A funding, led by Trevor Oelschig of General Catalyst, who has previously invested in enterprise SaaS companies such as Fivetran, Contentful, and Loom. This funding round was finalized at the end of last year.

Mosaic previously raised a $2.5 million seed investment led by Ross Fubini of XYZ Ventures in mid-2019. Fubini, formerly an investor at Village Global, expressed his interest in the company via email, noting that the founders shared a “common pain point” regarding the state of software for CFOs at Palantir, and “they all experienced this deep frustration with the tools they needed to perform their jobs.”

Additional investors in the Series A round included Felicis Ventures, along with XYZ and Village Global.

In conjunction with the funding announcement, the company also revealed the formation of an advisory board comprised of current and former CFOs from nine technology companies, including Palantir, Dropbox, and Shopify.

Many business functions have undergone a complete software-driven transformation. Now, Mosaic hopes to bring that same level of innovation to the CFO’s office.