Causal App secures £3 million Seed investment led by Accel

Causal raises $4.2m led by Accel to modernise the spreadsheet

Causal, a new way to work with numbers, has today announced a $4.2 million seed round led by Accel, with participation from existing investors Coatue, Passion Capital, Verissimo Ventures, Naval Ravikant, Varadh Jain and others. This round brings Causal’s total funding to $5.5 million. The company will use the new capital to grow the engineering team and take the product to market.

Today, spreadsheets are used by almost every company worldwide to crunch numbers and make business decisions. While finance teams live inside financial models, multiple teams across organisations are now becoming increasingly quantitative. Sales teams need to forecast their pipeline, marketing teams need to build growth strategies, and engineering teams need to plan their cloud spend. However, spreadsheets haven’t evolved over the last 40 years – cryptic formulas prove difficult to work with, they’re disconnected from a company’s data sources (accounting system, CRM, payments processor), and static outputs hinder collaboration. Spreadsheets just don’t meet the needs of today’s data-driven, collaborative workforce.

Founded in 2019 by Taimur Abdaal and Lukas Koebis, Causal’s vision is to replace Excel as the de-facto way to work with numbers on a computer. This starts at the spreadsheet’s foundation: formulas. 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.

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. Click here to see an example. 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.

Today, Causal is used by teams across the spectrum of organisations’ departments – from finance, HR, and sales to marketing, engineering and product. Targeting 100 – 500 person companies, this cross-departmental usage is central to the Causal team’s vision.

“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.

Causal will be officially launching the product on Product Hunt next month.

Safiya Marzook

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