Announcement day!! ?? ??
Excited to finally come out of stealth and announce Iris Finance to the world, along with our $2MM funding round led by Revolution with Rosecliff, Access Venture Partners, DA Ventures VC and several strategic angels.
Iris is the data orchestration platform that seamlessly integrates with existing systems to provide real time profitability insights and financial forecasts - the future of strategic finance for consumer brands, a next generation FP&A tool.
Over the last 12-24 months, our industry has had a horrible reckoning. Investment and M&A for CPG has fallen off a cliff, online distribution continues to get more expensive, and physical retail has never been more expensive.
The 'growth at all costs' era is officially over, and the 'profit or die' era is well underway. This massive shift in the 'northstar KPI' from growth to profitability has turned an entire industry on its head, as outside capital flowing into the industry has reached a near standstill. CPG founders and operators have been navigating one of the most difficult eras in one of the most difficult industries without proper tooling.
Modern CPG brands are unique in 2 senses; 1) every dollar that moves in, on, and around these businesses occurs digitally and in its own silo; 2) they exist as 'high velocity commerce' businesses that transact dozens of times per hour - making real time visibility crucial to driving profits as day to day profitability can vary significantly.
Perhaps miraculously, the macro shift toward profitability coincides with the most profound technological advancement likely of all time - generative AI.
In a true 'iphone moment', advancements in LLMs and ELT are what enable Iris to not only ingest, process, and contextualize massive amounts of siloed financial data - but also to identify & articulate areas of opportunity via a role-based agent. Think ChatGPT for the CFO.
Our mission is to give CPG brands better insights and better forecasts to ultimately run better businesses
With iris you can track your CPG brand's contribution, gross, and net margins in real time, identify your most profitable cohorts, model weekly cash flows, plan your strategic finances, and benchmark apples to apples vs your category peers; for approximately 2% of the cost of hiring a finance leader.
We are well out of beta and working with 30+ existing brands who have decided to invest in their financial infrastructure.
If you are a consumer brand looking to upgrade your financial source of truth, shoot me a DM or check us out at irisfinance.co.
I am extremely proud to be working on iris with my partners and friends in Alexander Heckmann, Yiheng(Intel) Chen, Marko Iwanik, Denton Zhao, Paul Sung
Read more about iris here:
https://lnkd.in/gv2qm5xv
