DataSnipper Raises $100M at $1B Valuation to Empower Auditors with AI
DataSnipper CEO Vidya Peters with co-founders Maarten Alblas, Jonas Ruyter and Kai Bakker
‘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’ — Vidya Peters, CEO of DataSnipper
QUICK TAKE
- DataSnipper raises a Series B round led by Index Ventures at a $1 billion valuation
- Funding comes after a breakout year, more than doubling revenue and customers
- DataSnipper focuses on audit and data reconciliation – the hidden driver of the global economy – using AI to automate tedious tasks, improve efficiency and freeing up auditors to do more value-added work
- Macro trends like auditor talent churn and regulation put DataSnipper at the forefront of disruption
- DataSnipper has launched two new products to accelerate cloud collaboration and improve AI-powered analysis and insights
INDEX PERSPECTIVE
By Hannah Seal, Partner at Index
Audit is the forgotten workflow. Your confidence in everything from the origin of the grapes in your glass of wine to the faith you have in the bank that collects your salary relies on audit trails. That means somewhere along the line, a human being has confirmed that a set of numbers lines up with reality. Trust is the foundation of the economy, and trust requires actual proof – not just assumptions.
Often this isn't glamorous work. On the contrary, it can be time-consuming, crushing and painstaking. Yet it’s also universal, which is why DataSnipper represents such a huge opportunity. Organizations across the globe spend approximately $220 billion annually on external audit alone to ensure compliance and accuracy in their financial reporting.
For the first time, DataSnipper is giving auditors, forensic accountants, CFOs, and basically anyone who has to verify data permission to enjoy their jobs again. By freeing them up and helping them do their work swiftly and painlessly, it’s helping them connect with the reasons they were drawn to these roles in the first place: often, to develop strong, strategic, meaningful partnerships with their clients.
People don’t think of finance professionals as early adopters – but they are, and when you solve a problem for them, they bring entire communities along for the ride. DataSnipper shows that AI isn’t just about automation eating the world, and taking our jobs – but working hand-in-hand with us, and giving us our humanity back.
DataSnipper, the leading intelligent automation platform for audit and finance professionals, has raised a $100 million Series B, led by Index Ventures, at a valuation of $1 billion – solidifying the company’s mission to empower auditors with AI, after a record year of doubling its customer base and revenue. The Series B follows an investment by Insight Partners in September 2022.
Audit is 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, something that happens inside and outside of all companies.
‘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,’ says DataSnipper CEO Vidya Peters. ‘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 expands horizons: new functionality, more verticals, more geographies
Founded six years ago, DataSnipper has more than doubled its revenue several years in a row. It serves more than 400,000 auditors across 125 countries – including leading brands such as Deloitte, KPMG, Ernst & Young and PwC. While its core market is currently external audit – the firms that check company accounts – the new funding will help DataSnipper expand across new verticals including internal auditors, tax advisors, forensic accountants, and other sectors involving data reconciliation. DataSnipper already 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.
DataSnipper has recently released new product suites to better serve finance professionals across diverse sectors. Its Cloud Collaboration Suite allows for secure and seamless real-time coordination across distributed teams, while its AI Suite allows users to ask questions in natural language, and then automatically analyze and surface insights from any unstructured documents and data.
AI reverses the trend of auditor burnout
A key feature driving DataSnipper’s adoption among external auditors is that the sector is coming under historic pressure. 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.
Together, these trends have created pain and bottlenecks as auditors struggle to manually comb through documents and reconcile endless streams of information. The result is that auditors are churning out of the profession in record numbers: around 1 in 5 auditors quits their job every year, 80% of auditors will leave their company within 5 years, and as many as 82% of auditors with 6 or more years of experience will leave the profession within a year.
DataSnipper's AI-powered platform addresses the root causes of auditor burnout by bringing efficiency and delight to the process of audit. 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. These ‘snips’ automatically reconcile against transactions, creating airtight audit trails with a click. What was once the work of hours is now a matter of seconds, freeing auditors from drudgery to focus on strategic insights. By meeting auditors where they work, then leveraging AI to amplify their expertise, DataSnipper helps to inject collaboration and dynamism back into a profession that’s losing talent to tedium.
‘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,’ says CEO Vidya Peters.
‘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.’
‘When I first saw DataSnipper in action, I thought I was watching a magic show. This software is seriously genius,’ says Amy Rose, senior auditor at BDO in the US, a major external audit firm. ‘Not only does embracing new software like DataSnipper make my job easier, but it ultimately allows me to deliver a better audit to my clients by leveraging the analytical capabilities of these tools so that our teams can resource our time on more complex and interesting procedures.’
‘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,’ says Hannah Seal, partner at Index Ventures who led the round and will join the board. ‘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.’
Published — Feb. 1, 2024
