Toronto-based FinTech startup Glassbox wants to reimagine the humble workhorse of corporate finance.
Led by a former investment banker, the company is developing a software platform designed to help professionals in the space build financial models and evaluate deals faster than traditional spreadsheet tools like Microsoft Excel.
“I tried to automate my way out of my job.”
Allison Harris, Glassbox
Glassbox has emerged from stealth, announced $1.65 million CAD in pre-seed funding, and opened up the waitlist for its financial modelling and analysis platform as it gears up for a more fulsome rollout later this year.
Founded in 2023 by CEO Allison Harris, who has an engineering background and experience in energy investment banking and derivatives structuring on Wall Street, and CTO Ian Kennedy, a seasoned software engineer, Glassbox hopes to help finance teams save time and take full advantage of artificial intelligence (AI).
“What our product’s excellent at is building any financial model really fast,” Harris told BetaKit in an exclusive interview.
Glassbox’s pre-seed round, which closed in August and was raised via simple agreement for future equity, was co-led by Toronto-based StandUp Ventures and New York City’s FinTech Collective, with support from Los Angeles-based Watertower Ventures. It brings Glassbox’s total funding to $1.85 million, a figure that includes $200,000 from Antler from 2023.
During her time on Wall Street, much of Harris’ work involved spending long hours building financial models in massive, complex spreadsheets via Microsoft Excel. The pace of deals was “relentless,” and she had many friends in the same boat. “Their late nights were so often because of these error-prone, 20-tab spreadsheets they had to crunch numbers on,” she said.
Frustrated by this, Harris said she built a solution using the programming language Python that allowed her to construct analytical processes for deals faster.
“I tried to automate my way out of my job,” she said.
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Sensing an opportunity, Harris ultimately quit investment banking after just two years to focus full-time on solving this problem, joining Antler’s Residency program as part of its Winter 2023 cohort. There, she met Kennedy and the pair decided to team up.
While other industries have embraced collaboration tools and AI assistants, Harris noted that finance teams have been left with bigger, more complex Excel files.
“Thus far, tools like Copilot in Excel or other Excel integrations have failed to really elevate financial analysts in the way that engineers have been elevated by [large-language model] solutions,” Harris claimed.
Glassbox hopes to change that with its platform, which is designed to enable customers to generate complex financial analyses faster and more easily with AI. The startup is building agentic tools on top of existing frontier models. Glassbox’s FinScript framework allows users to input plain text instructions that align with large-language models’ capabilities for processing written information, which the company claims adds context and structure to data and enables faster, more auditable analysis.
In a statement, FinTech Collective co-founder and managing partner Brooks Gibbins described Glassbox as “the financial modelling equivalent of GitHub for code management or Notion for content creation.”
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Harris said that some of Glassbox’s users do not even need AI to build spreadsheets faster, claiming that building financial models on its platform relative to the complex linking and manual formatting required by Excel saves time. But every Glassbox model can still be easily converted into an Excel spreadsheet.
“We will always support Excel export, but we will … continuously make it so that that becomes less and less necessary,” she said.
Harris claimed Glassbox’s platform could be used to build financial models in any sector. But as a small team, the startup is focusing on energy infrastructure and real estate initially, targeting private equity investors, corporate development professionals, and small investment banks in this space.
To date, Glassbox has invested its pre-seed funding largely in product development, expanding its team from two to four employees to complete the build of its product and begin delivering it. Now, the startup is putting some of its capital towards its go-to-market efforts. At the moment, Harris claimed that Glassbox has about 20 months of runway remaining.
Glassbox is currently working to move folks from its waitlist into a private beta as the company readies for a broader launch later this year, when it plans to fundraise again.
Feature image courtesy Glassbox.