Fuelfinance is a company that makes software for financial management and planning in startups. And the company offers a suite of tools and a personal touch of its financial success managers that can replace an ERP system and a financial department. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Fuelfinance CEO Alyona Mysko to learn more.
Formation Of The Company
How did the idea behind the company come together? Fuelfinance was launched by two Ukrainian entrepreneurs, Alyona Mysko and Yaroslav Azhnyuk, with Ukrainians comprising most of the team, while the company’s biggest market is in the US. And Mysko said:
“Despite the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the founders and many team members remained in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities and were able to triple the business last year in an act of defiance of Russian aggression.”
“Fuelfinance has been a bootstrapped and profitable business for the last two years, with a few dozen of clients, including Reface – a viral social app, a few YC-backed startups such as Petcube and Awesomic, and other clients totaling over $200 million in P&L under management.”
“I’ve been working in finance for nine years; of which the last four years I was doing consulting. I founded Fuelfinance 4 years ago, and now a team of 35 people full-time.”
“Yaroslav has been a serial entrepreneur for 14 years, including a co-founder and CEO at Petcube (YC W’16) for the last ten years. He found Fuel as a solution to his frustration with finance two years ago as a client and joined Fuel first as an advisor two years ago and later as a co-founder.”
Idea Behind Fuelfinance
What motivated Mysko to pursue this idea? Mysko shared:
“As a founder, I had gained more than ten years of finance experience when I created Fuelfinance. I’ve built financial models and systems for over 200 projects.”
“I was working with founders and learning the main pain points by providing our financial services daily. And I realized that most SMBs cannot afford six-figure ERPs so they are using old Excel spreadsheets and processes from the nineties.
“The finance domain is outdated, and many founders believe financial management is irrelevant so about 38% of startups end up going bankrupt after running out of cash. That is insane!”
“Imagine we were throwing away 38% of food or any goods we produce. Fuelfinance’s mission is to save companies from financial mistakes that should not have happened. If we succeed in that, then we can help people save their life’s work.”
Core Products
What are Fuelfinance’s core products? Mysko explained:
“Fuelfinance is a cloud financial department for startups. We replace the current workflow with Spreadsheets + financial managers with a 10x better solution. Fuel manages over $200 million in P&L for our clients, including Petcube (YC alumni, $25 million raised), Awesomic (YC alumni, $2 million raised), Lemon.io (bootstrapped and killing it), Delfast ($4 million raised).”
“Fuelfinance replaces the most mundane work of startup founders and financial teams, with its suite of tools which streamline financial management from bookkeeping to producing reliable P&L statements, and then – financial planning scenarios, and economics, and dashboards. This allows management teams to make decisions based on reliable data and stop wasting days on manual spreadsheet-fighting.”
Funding/Revenue
Mysko told me the company had raised just $1 million in seed funding. The investors include two CEOs of unicorn companies: Bolt’s Markus Villig and SendBird’s John S. Kim.
Accolades
During the interview, Mysko also highlighted some of the company’s recent accolades:
“Google for Startups and the EBRD both gave us grants. We also got the #1 Product of the Day on Product Hunt and #2 at Golden Kitty Award. We were mentioned in CNN, American Banker, Insider, Washington Post and many others. Also, we were highlighted by the following podcasts: Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman, Startup Mindsets, Talks with Petri and many others. And recently we were awarded by Capterra, one of most trusted software review platforms, in 2 categories: Financial Management and Financial Reporting, for both The Best Value and The Best Ease of Use.
