Numeric: Using AI to create accounting “magic”

For most finance teams, the close process is a painful endeavor. Accountants constantly document what happened in a given month, quarter or year, combing through everything from billing records to payroll data to ensure it’s recorded correctly. It’s time-consuming, often manual work.

The result? Businesses operate off of weeks-old portraits of their financial data and accounting is relegated to a back-office function. While some companies have tried to improve the close process over the years, no one has been able to make it meaningfully better — until now.

Numeric is the first company to take an AI-native approach to close automation — harnessing the power of large language models (LLMs) to aggregate and analyze unstructured data and help finance teams close their books in a fraction of the time it takes them today.

That’s why IVP is joining Numeric’s $28 million Series A financing, fueling the company’s growth as it aims for even greater heights.

A game changer for accountants

Parker Gilbert — who was previously VP of Finance and Operations at Hearth and built its finance org from the ground up — deeply understands the challenges his customers face. And that understanding is reflected in Numeric’s product, designed in collaboration with his co-founders, CTO Andrew Bihl and CPO Anthony Alvernaz, experts in engineering and product.

Say a company buys a new server that has to conform to a specific deprecation schedule. Typically, accountants have to figure out the type of server procured, determine its useful life, confirm their estimate with the infrastructure team, manually enter details on the server into an Excel spreadsheet with the right deprecation schedule, and make journal entries every month recording depreciation into NetSuite.

With Numeric, all you have to do is upload the invoice. Numeric leverages AI to recognize the type of server, understand what’s been done in the past with similar equipment, reference the latest accounting guidelines, generate a deprecation schedule and tee up a monthly journal entry directly into an ERP platform.

By automating this “subledger” work, what used to take hours or even days can be done in seconds. And accountants can serve as reviewers instead of preparers — giving them more time to focus on the more strategic aspects of their jobs.

Happy customers and an enormous runway

Close automation alone is a multi-billion dollar market, and over the past year, Numeric has experienced explosive growth — quadrupling revenue and attracting high-profile customers like OpenAI, Brex and Plaid. Multiple CFOs we’ve talked to have called what Numeric does “magical.”

But the most interesting thing we heard customers say is that they’re starting to spend more time in Numeric than they are in NetSuite, Oracle or Excel because it’s where the real work is being done. That means Numeric has an opportunity to disrupt the general ledger and ERP market over time, which is hundreds of times bigger than close automation alone.

By accelerating every part of the close process, Numeric is supercharging accountants' workflows in a way they've never seen before. It’s impossible for anyone who looks at Numeric’s product not to want it, and we’re eager to help Parker, Andrew, Anthony and the team bring their magic to even more customers.