Accounting automation and collaboration platform FloQast raises $110M

FloQast, an accounting collaboration, automation and close-management platform, has raised $110 million in a series D round of funding at a $1.2 billion valuation.

Financial close management is the business process of checking and adjusting account balances at the end of each month or other predefined period, to publish compliant financial reports for regulators, managers, shareholders, or any other relevant stakeholder that needs to know a company’s current financial position. However, getting a company’s books into a ship-shape condition is easier said than done, particularly for larger businesses — more often than not it’s a manual, time-consuming process that’s rife for human error. And that is where FloQast enters the fray.

Close call

Founded in 2013, Los-Angeles-based FloQast works with a slew of high-profile customers including Snowflake, Zoom, Lyft, GrubHub, Twilio, and Yelp. The company’s flagship FloQast Close product serves as a single, centralized place for teams to manage all their recurring close-management work, including tracking outstanding tasks; collaborative checklists and review notes for assigning tasks and viewing who needs to do what; and a transparent roll-up of all accounts reconciliations, replete with ERP and Excel integrations to automate part of the auditing “tie-out” process.

Above: FloQast dashboard

Elsewhere, FloQast includes support for automated alerts if amounts change after sign-offs are finalized, while users can also configure the platform to automatically request more information from relevant parties if anything is missing during a close. And built-in analytics can help managers track efficiencies by using historical data to spot month-end close trends over time and identify bottlenecks.

Above: FloQast analytics

Automation for the people

Prior to now, FloQast had raised around $120 million, and with its latest cash injection the company is well-financed to capitalize on a growing push toward automation across the accountancy sphere. In the past few months alone, companies including Osome, Auditoria, Zeni, Lockstep, and Georges have all raised sizable sums to help accountancy teams automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks.

But perhaps more than that, FloQast is well-positioned to support the burgeoning remote work trend that is likely to linger long after the global pandemic has subsided. Team collaboration tools such as Zoom, Slack, and Microsoft Teams have already benefited from a more distributed workforce, and FloQast’s shared workspace is designed to fulfill a similar role for finance teams.

FloQast’s series D round was led by Meritech Capital, with participation from Insight Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, Coupa Ventures, Polaris Partners, and Norwest Venture Partners.