DataSnipper – a leading intelligent automation platform for audit and finance professionals – announced it had raised a $100 million Series B, led by Index Ventures, at a valuation of $1 billion. This solidifies the company’s goal to empower auditors with AI after a record year of doubling its customer base and revenue. The Series B funding round follows an investment by Insight Partners in September 2022.
Audit is considered a bedrock of the global economy, powering growth by creating confidence in the truth of financial data worldwide. It’s not a sector so much as a universal workflow that happens inside and outside of all companies.
Launched six years ago, DataSnipper has more than doubled its revenue several years in a row. It serves over 400,000 auditors across 125 countries, including leading brands such as Deloitte, KPMG, Ernst & Young, and PwC. And while the core market is currently external audit (the firms that check company accounts), the new funding will enable DataSnipper to expand across new verticals, including internal auditors, tax advisors, forensic accountants, and other sectors involving data reconciliation.
DataSnipper counts Hilton, Siemens, Frontier Airlines, and the Government of Queensland as customers in these segments, and the company is also expanding rapidly across the Asia-Pacific and Latin American markets. And DataSnipper recently released new product suites to serve finance professionals across diverse sectors better.
The company’s Cloud Collaboration Suite allows for secure and seamless real-time coordination across distributed teams. The AI Suite allows users to ask questions in natural language and then automatically analyze and surface insights from any unstructured documents and data. A major feature driving DataSnipper’s adoption among external auditors is that the sector is under historic pressure. And the regulation and scrutiny of audit have deepened following high-profile accounting scandals, leading to calls for greater competition in the sector. Meanwhile, companies are producing exponentially more data.
These trends together have created pain and bottlenecks as auditors struggle to comb through documents and reconcile endless streams of information manually. And the result is that auditors are churning out of the profession in record numbers. About 1 in 5 auditors quit their job every year, and 80% of auditors will leave their company within 5 years.
DataSnipper’s AI-powered platform handles the root causes of auditor burnout by bringing efficiency and delight to the audit process. And the platform embeds automation directly into Excel, eliminating crushing manual work by letting auditors simply ‘snip’ numbers from any file, such as an invoice, bank statement or inventory document.
The snips automatically reconcile against transactions, creating airtight audit trails with a click. And what used to take hours is now a matter of seconds, freeing auditors from drudgery to focus on strategic insights. By meeting auditors where they work, then utilizing AI to amplify their expertise, DataSnipper helps to inject collaboration and dynamism back into a profession that’s losing talent to tedium.
KEY QUOTES:
“Half the world is creating more data than ever before, half the world needs to verify it – that’s the premise of the entire economy. DataSnipper lies at the intersection.’ Using DataSnipper’s tool, auditors can automate away up to 90% of menial tasks and boost business growth by cutting costs in half.”
“DataSnipper is on a mission to change the culture of audit and unlock auditors and finance professionals to do their best work – applying specialized skills rather than scouring files to verify data. Our customers tell us we’ve made their job fun for the first time. By automating repetitive tasks, DataSnipper redefines the ground-rules through technology. Audits can be done more quickly and to a higher quality, while challenger firms can take on more complex and strategic assignments. DataSnipper lets auditors focus their expertise on assessments of risk and strategy, and to play that essential advisory role that no algorithm can.”
– DataSnipper CEO Vidya Peters
“DataSnipper lies at the intersection of macro trends shaping audit – ballooning regulation, talent churn and pent-up pressure for challenger firms beyond the Big Four. It’s not a technology in search of a use-case – it’s a profound unmet need among auditors and finance teams. DataSnipper’s growth into new sectors comes directly from user demand, as professionals keep asking for the product once they experience how fast and delightful it is. By starting from auditors’ Excel workflows rather than forcing them to migrate to a new platform, adoption is rapid and loyalty is fanatical. We’re thrilled to be backing Vidya and the whole team as they scale globally.”
– Hannah Seal, partner at Index Ventures who led the round and will join the board
