This startup just landed $8.5 million led by Bessemer to help companies automate their financial operations • TechCrunch

The problem of cash flow reconciliation is a growing problem, especially in light of the explosion of digital payments since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. As companies that handle customer payments expand into new markets, add new products and handle increasing transaction volumes, the more complex the process becomes.

Enter Nilus, a startup that aims to help simplify this process with a no-code platform. Founded from a basement last year by Daniel Kalish and Danielle ShaulNilus has raised $8.5 million in a seed funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners.

As is the case with many startups, both Kalish and Shaul said they experienced the problem they’re trying to solve in their previous roles. Kalish spent more than five years at PayPal, most recently as head of market development and GTM for Central Eastern Europe, Russia and Israel. Shaul spent more than five years at Fundbox – most recently as a software architect and before that as R&D manager leading both credit and fraud risk and underwriting projects and building breakthrough products using ML and big data.

“The payments industry actually has a big data problem today,” Kalish told TechCrunch in an interview. “On the surface level, it looks very easy to start collecting payments – by working with Stripe, PayPal or banks, for example. But behind the scenes data is so messy and finance teams struggle to understand what is going on, what their financial position is or make sure there is no risk involved in accepting and sending payments to their customers.”

The biggest challenge, he added, is the fact that financial payment data basically resides between multiple locations within an organization.

“You have payment data with your payment processor or with your bank or with your ERP and your finance team is often trying to match those data points either manually or by running some funky Excel or SQL script just so they can get the clarity they need around their economic and activity,” Kalish said.

In building economically infrastructure over the past decade, Shaul said she saw finance teams “going back and forth” to identify incoming payments.

So the pair teamed up to build Nilus, a company they say offers a “plug and play” payment operations platform for finance teams moving significant volumes of dollars. Their goal is to help these teams understand all the underlying data behind payment activity so they can have “a real-time view of cash, reduce risk and always be ready for audit,” said Kalish, who serves as Nilus’ CEO.

Kalish and Shaul say the technology includes “pre-built data connectors” and algorithms that allow finance teams to analyze that data and ultimately automate reconciliation, reporting and payment workflows.

“We’ll see reconciliation in a way like the building blocks you can build many capacities on, Shaul, the startup’s CTO, told TechCrunch. “When you can move the money with confidence and have visibility, you can manage things, you can forecast things, you can predict — you can do so many great things on top of that.”

Image credit: Nilus

Nilus’ target customers are fintechs, financial services companies, marketplaces and vertical SaaS outfits – or basically any company with built-in fintech products that are already moving customer money. Although it will not reveal specific customers, Nilus says it is working with companies that process “hundreds of millions of dollars.”

The startup’s headquarters and go-to-market team are based out of New York, and its technical team out of Tel Aviv. The company currently has 18 employees.

Also participating in the startup’s seed funding round is Better Tomorrow Ventures, Symbol and CEOs and founders of fintech companies including Unit, Alloy, Melio and Lithic.

“We’ve seen so many companies working with outdated financial workflows that the space is in desperate need of innovation,” Adam Fisher, a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, said in a written statement.

Sheel Mohnot of Better Tomorrow Ventures agrees, noting that his firm was “amazed” by how many companies still used Excel for financial reconciliation.

“Fifinancial teams are really underserved, Shaul said. “Most reconciliation platforms out there are for banks.”