Today, spreadsheets are used by almost every company worldwide to crunch numbers and make business decisions. However, it still uses cryptic formulas, which proves difficult to work with at times.
In fact, they are disconnected from a company’s data sources (accounting system, CRM, payments processor), and static outputs hinder collaboration.
Meet Causal, the UK startup that lets you build financial models effortlessly and share them with interactive, visual dashboards that everyone will understand.
Raised £3 million
Recently, a London-based startup that’s aiming to replace Microsoft Excel, has secured a $4.2 million (approx £3 million) funding in a Seed round, bringing the total funding to $5.5 million (approx £4 million).
The round was led by Accel, with participation from existing investors Coatue, Passion Capital, Verissimo Ventures, Naval Ravikant, Varadh Jain, and others.
How will the funding be used?
The funding will be used to grow the engineering team and take the product to market. Causal will be officially launching the product on Product Hunt next month.
Aims to replace Excel
Founded in 2019 by Taimur Abdaal and Lukas Koebis, Causal is a tool for performing calculations, visualising data, and communicating with numbers.
The platform lets users build their models out of variables, which they can then link together in simple plain-English formulae. This makes it easy to understand and quick to build as well.
Causal’s formulas read like plain English — “Profit = Revenue – Costs” — and it typically takes 100x fewer formulas in Causal to build exactly the same model in Excel.
Why Causal?
According to the company, once team members have set up their model and connected their data through the many integrations that Causal offers (Stripe, QuickBooks, Salesforce to name a few), beautiful charts and reports can be generated in just one click.
When users are done, Causal lets them share their model in an interactive dashboard where teams can collaborate in order to better understand the models themselves.
Notably, granular permissions enable users to set who can see and edit their models, while version control enables people to easily roll back to previous versions.
At present, Causal is used by teams across the spectrum of organisations’ departments – from finance, HR, and sales to marketing, engineering, and product.
“Business planning and forecasting should involve every team in a company, but the complexity of spreadsheets means that it’s often siloed within finance,” said Taimur Abdaal, CEO and co-founder at Causal. “We want to democratise this process with a truly horizontal product that every knowledge worker can use, and we’re excited to have Accel join us on the next phase of our journey.”
“Many of us have felt the pain that comes with building and managing large spreadsheets across teams and data sources firsthand,” said Seth Pierrepont, Partner at Accel. “Taimur and Lukas are talented, product-focused founders who have taken the intuitive Excel-like interface that we’re all familiar with, and supercharged it with data integrations, collaboration features, and high-quality visualizations. Beyond that, they’ve leveraged their data science and mathematics backgrounds to offer sophisticated models out of the box, giving all users the ability to harness much more powerful predictive capabilities. We’re very excited to back the Causal team on the next phase of their journey and bring spreadsheets into the modern era!”
“Causal has a big vision and a truly differentiated product that customers love. I’m thrilled to see them take it to market this year.” — Varadh Jain, entrepreneur and Causal’s first angel investor.