Closing Books Faster with AI: A Vision for Accountants

0:00Ben Murray: Greetings, everyone. I'm excited to welcome Alex Lee, CEO and co-founder at Truewind AI for Accountants. Alex, welcome to the show.

0:06Alex Lee: Thanks for having me here. It's great to be here.

0:09Ben Murray: Yeah, great to have you here. Looking forward to this because definitely in my audience and on my newsletter, I have a lot of CFOs, controllers, CPAs. So this will be interesting. But before we talk about Truewind, tell us a little bit about your background because I was looking through LinkedIn and I was thinking, hey, there'd be some accounting stuff in there. Maybe there is. But yeah, tell us about your background.

0:28Alex Lee: It's a little bit of an odd roundabout way that I got into the world of accounting. But real quick, I'm Alex. I'm one of the co-founder and CEO at Truen. We're building AI for accountants, not to replace, but always for accountants. We believe in uplifting the profession. And we believe that now more than ever, accountants need this new breed of tools. I've been building this company for three and a half years. I've been starting startups for, shoot, what is it now? Five, six years. So I had a FP &A startup before this, both YC-backed. Perhaps the odd part of my story was I started off as an aerospace engineer in the aerospace industry.

1:04Alex Lee: I worked for Boeing, helped design the 7X aircraft, which is the Trans-Pacific Aircraft. Saul, on your background, Ben, you worked in the airline industry for a long time. That's right. Very cool. I don't want to derail this, but certainly it would be fun going down that rabbit hole with you. But yeah, I spent the other part of my career in the aerospace world before I found my way into venture capital and all technology and now building startups.

1:27Ben Murray: Yeah, yeah, I love that. And I know we could talk about airlines quite a bit. It's a bit of an airline geek for my background. But yeah, let's love that background. And so let's talk about Truend and what it does. And you said you had a startup before this. And was it related to accounting or you mentioned FP &A?

1:49Alex Lee: In the FP &A space, I've been building in the CFO category for a long time. I think that stems from having been in venture capital. As a junior investor, you do spend a lot of time with the portfolio companies and usually in some sort of finance management capacity, whether it's forecasting, reporting, making sure that we have as clear a line of sight to financial visibility. So that led me to my first company called Blue Light that was backed by YC in the winter 21 batch. Had a great time, learned a lot of things. First time starting a startup. You certainly learn how to do a lot of things wrong and try not to mistake, make those mistakes the second time around.

2:25Alex Lee: My journey there came to an end in 2020. What was that? 22. And we had this feeling of, shall we say, didn't accomplish what I went out to do, right? Still, I was in love with the office of the CFO. So as I dug into it more, then I found my way into, you know what? I want to move my way to the bottom or the beginning of the data stack. You can't really do FP &A without getting your accounting data buttoned up. So start a TrueWin to build the app for accountants and to empower them with an agent for workspace to get your close and reporting done faster and better. And that's what I've been building now over the past three and a half years.

3:05Ben Murray: Yeah, I love it. So, yeah, let's talk about TrueWin because we know for my listeners, yeah, we know about the close process and closing the books. So tell us a little bit about TrueWin and where is it plugging into that process? So a lot to dive into here, but plugging into that process, and then we'll talk about how has that accountant's role changed. But yeah, tell us a little bit more about TrueWin and where it starts in that closed process.

3:30Alex Lee: We're not an ERP. Let me first start saying that. We like to say that we're your fastest way to eat AI without replacing your ERP. But we understand that there are reasons to, and there are many players on the market doing very well. and we're strong supporters of them. We wish them all the best. Our view is if you're on an ERP that's working and reliable, we can bring AI tools to you through an agenda workspace. And I'll get into a little bit of what that means. In terms of where we sit within the stack, if you think upstream is your raw financial data, you have your bank statements from J.K.

4:01Alex Lee: Morgan, you have your broker statements from Charles Schwab, you have your revenue data from Stripe or your donation data from PayPal, service titan whatever it is there's all this systems upstream that runs your organization the job of the account is to take that data which is a representation of the activity that has happened within the company and interpret that data interpret it in journal entries in devs and credits and that's what a lot of the manual work that accountants have to do i need to take that raw file make sense of what happened create journal entries and get them posted into whichever erp year-round, QuickBooks Online, Sage and Tag, NetSuite, Millet, et cetera.

4:41Alex Lee: We sit in that layer in between. We take those raw data files and we produce journal entries and work papers for you. So that's what Truen does. Truen is agents that prepares work papers and journal entries. We get those journal entries into your general ledger. And then we help on the other side as well, creating reports, creating custom reports that you need to present to your board, management, whoever it may be.

5:05Ben Murray: Okay. And now there's a nuance there because I was thinking with a, say, AI-assisted close or helping in that process, like you mentioned, all right, we've got a connection to our bank. We've got a connection to the credit card, to Stripe, and that usually comes direct connect into the ERP and then we do all our close magic. But in this case, are you saying you're intercepting that, you're connecting to, say, a Stripe or a bank and then feeding that into the ERP.

5:31Alex Lee: Yes, that's exactly right. Now, the word connecting means a lot. People love saying connecting or integrating, and that can mean a million and one things. Traditionally, in world software, we think of it as API connections. The thing about API connections is not all APIs are the same. And you've seen this plenty, I'm sure, man. There are good APIs, there are bad APIs. And even though what we've seen is even though the cost of development has come down, which means in theory you can build these API connections faster, cheaper than ever. Even though you can build the connection faster, you cannot exceed the limitation of how good the API is.

6:07Alex Lee: So some of these companies just don't have robust API setup. You can connect to it and you can only fetch a few things and it doesn't solve the problem. Oh, I can connect to more things now. That's fine, but it still doesn't mean you can get everything you need out of it. And so when you say connecting, yes, but from our vantage point, our customers work with such messy data intensive files. We found they're very willing to even just download the file, feed us the file, and let the agent go to work on it.

6:40Ben Murray: Yeah, that's a great point because I've used Saster's API grader. And you're right now, API is so important. They're agentic-friendly APIs. And you're right, not all APIs are built the same. you think, hey, API, it's going to give me all the data I need. No, not the case. So for the CFOs and controllers listening, so I hook up Truewind and either, yeah, that could be a connection, quote unquote, or we just feed the raw data into it. At the end of the day, like how is it making their life easier? Is that faster closed? Are the closed entries better documented? Do we have better subledgers? Tell us a little bit about how it's making a controller's life easier.

7:17Alex Lee: All of the above, but let's go with subledgers. The way I like to put this is the assets of an accountant. Okay, you have a team of accountants on your team. The asset of your accountant is not the fact that they can operate your QBO or operate your Sajin tax. The asset of them is the work papers they create. The units of point. This number in my ERP, I can go to my work paper and show you the audit trail of where this came from. The work paper is that asset. The other asset of your accountant is the standard operating procedure, the steps that they have to execute to make sure their work is done.

7:54Alex Lee: Those are the real assets of your accountant. And that's what we are here to do. So if you were to open up Truewind, it's going to be a Excel interface. I believe the spreadsheet is the greatest piece of software ever created. No one can convince me otherwise. It has the perfect amount of rigidness, but also flexibility that the field of accounting and finance needs. Okay, so Truend, you have a spreadsheet. Next to it, you have a chat interface. Fortunately for us, both we're very familiar with. But what we're really helping you do is we're building out these work papers in your spreadsheet. And then the agent is going to build a standard operating procedure.

8:33Alex Lee: Based off of how you built that work paper, we codify that as an SOP. There's now no excuse to never have an SOP because for us, you literally click a button and we generate the SOP. the agents that follow these standard operative procedures going forward. So if you believe in what we believe, our thesis is the asset of an accountant is your work paper and SOP, both of which live in static, a static format in the mind of a human. We digitize that, but in a gentic native way.

9:03Ben Murray: I love that. I wish I had you when I was manually reconciling my deferred revenue subledger and capitalized commissions, all that stuff. So love that process, especially the SOPs, because I love that. Just good old-fashioned process that we've documented this. Auditors love that. And now thinking about audit, I don't know if this question comes up when you're talking to prospects, but OK, AI created the work paper and the journal entry. Of course, we have all this great backup, but can I pass an audit with this? Does that question come up?

9:33Alex Lee: Yes, all the time. We work with private equity-backed companies. We work with companies getting acquired. We work with large family offices. We work a lot with nonprofits. That audit comes up every single time. So very familiar to say the least.

9:47Ben Murray: Yeah. Okay, perfect. And then how do you think, it's interesting, the CPA market, the accounting market, how all these different states are changing their requirements, say to get CPA licensure, making it easier, need more accounts out there. How do you think the role or the job duties of the accountant is changing now with AI to help us with this closed process?

10:06Alex Lee: Yeah, that's the million dollar question that the big brass in the field of accounting is all wrestling with is how this is changing. I'm fortunate to be part of a kind of like a working committee with several technology vendors and CPA firms and professional societies to think through this. A lot of prevailing theories, none of which you haven't heard of moving accountants from preparers to reviewers. We're certainly seeing more of that. I don't know how we reconcile that with the fact that at a public company, there needs to be a designated preparer and a designated reviewer. I don't hear anyone talking about having to prepare being a technology, right?

10:45Alex Lee: It seems like we always need a name next to it. So I don't know. I have opinions. I have theories as to how it's going to play out. But much of it, perhaps a little bit early. We're still debating the whole fixed fee versus billable hours model. AI is not going to be the final nail in the coffin. I don't know what is. But still, many firms out there are on billable hour models. Yeah.

11:04Ben Murray: Yeah. And fair answer. Like any role, how is AI changing that and changing, say, the FP &A role to make it more automated from prepping the data to more analysis, which we all love to do in FP &As. Yeah, love that. And tell us real quick before we move on. So what kind of company, you know, we'll get to maybe integrations and go to market, but what's your ICP right now? Can I be a million dollar startup or a hundred million dollar company? Who are you going after? And there doesn't matter what vertical?

11:28Alex Lee: Thanks for asking that. So our sweet spot is in the 20 million to 500 million annual revenue range. Call it 20 to 250 a sweet spot, but we've got up to 500 million. We're actually pretty far advanced with a company that's well over a billion. And so we're constantly stretching the bands of what it is that Truman can do. The way to think about who we work with is we work with accountants. And there are accountants at CTA firms and there are accountants in-house. and we design our product uniquely to work very well with both. In terms of the verticals that we work a lot with, a lot of that was listening to the market.

12:04Alex Lee: Turns out the ones with very, very complex and large volumes of data tend to flock to us. We work a lot with nonprofits that have very tricky fund management, sorry, fund accounting challenges, a lot with financial services and family offices, manufacturing, insurance, construction, technology, and actually being in Silicon Valley, there's no shortage of technology companies we work with, but that's the flavor of the verticals.

12:30Ben Murray: Okay. Okay. It makes sense. Yeah. So around 20 to 250, but 500, maybe to a billion or more, which I love. And so you mentioned maybe three and a half, so founded about 2022? Founded, incorporated in 2022, which if anyone knows their AI history, it was the same month

12:45Alex Lee: as Shad2PG's launch. So you can imagine what prompted me to incorporate this company. But Koli got started January of 23rd when we went to YC.

12:54Ben Murray: Okay. Okay. Sounds good. Let's talk fundraising a little bit. It looks like you've raised a couple rounds. So how much capital have you raised to date?

12:59Alex Lee: We've raised 17, 4 million seed around at 13 million Series A.

13:03Ben Murray: Okay. So 17 raised to date. And it looks like maybe the seed was early on and then the Series A maybe, I don't know, a year ago or so. So tell us, I'm curious with that Series A, what led to that raise? Was there a trigger, a milestone that said we could use some more capital or want more capital?

13:21Alex Lee: I think it was opportunistic in terms of growth. We were growing well. We understood what it is that the customers wanted. And we had started unlocking the CPA market. So we thought, great, this is a good chance to go raise capital and start pouring fuel in the finance developing for our customers. So was it a milestone? I don't know, a little less, more so. We saw the opportunity ahead of us and thought, yes, I understand how we can go deploy this capital to do right by our accounting customers.

13:53Ben Murray: Yeah. Yeah. I love that. That's always a question for founders. I help if we raise, where are we going to deploy that? Do we have a plan? So you and your background lived in that investor world. So I'm curious when you look back at your fundraising journey, any lessons learned or things that stand out that you'd like to share with the founder community that may help them as they go through funding rounds?

14:13Alex Lee: Yes. Many, many, and let me throw, let me see if I can keep it organized. So I don't just start rambling here. A quick sidebar, people think, oh, you come from venture capital, it must be really easy to raise money. That's not entirely true. Actually, I don't think that's true at all. At least you understand the dynamics, the deal dynamics that unfold, right? When you're talking term sheet terms, you don't have to go look up every single term. I understand it all. But if you think of fundraising, you do it once every, I don't know, year and a half, two years. What about the rest of the time you run in the business?

14:45Ben Murray: That's the bulk of it, right? Those are important things.

14:47Alex Lee: But in terms of lessons in fundraising, the first one I always let, I always tell founders raising for the first time is don't be too greedy on price. If your company is excellent, get a term sheet and let other funds get excited to bid you up rather than coming in too high and then shutting certain things out. I've also found when it comes to, when it comes to getting, like working with a fund that's excited to work with you, yes, you want to be as within their sweet spot as much as possible, but I've seen many funds flex up and down to make certain deals work. A certain fund might say, my typical check size is up here, but they really like what you're doing.

15:24Alex Lee: They're going to flex down to work with the smaller check size. Or a fund says, my check size is over here, smaller, but you're perfectly aligned to the thesis and they had to flex up on check size. They'll find a way to go do that as well. So those aren't the reasons why a fund won't invest. They like the founder, they like the space, like the company and everything that you're doing. When it comes to deal dynamics, investors are really good at that. They do that day in and day out, and they will find a way to make the deal dynamics work for them. So that was an unexpected lesson I learned in fundraising.

15:56Ben Murray: Great insights. And just one more question there to take advantage of your venture background, because a lot of founders without that background, they bring up founder-investor fit in that thesis and believing the market. So I'm curious from your side and just your venture experience, how do you think about founder investor fit from the other side of the table when you were on that side?

16:16Alex Lee: Yeah. So when I was an investor, I was a corporate investor at Renault, Nissan and Mitsubishi. So when it comes to knowledge of the space, we knew it pretty deep. We knew the industry very deeply because we lived in the inside out. When you work with most institutional investors, that may not be the case because they have a pretty broad thesis. They look into a lot of verticals. So I think it's fair to say you shouldn't expect your investor to know your world as detailed as you do. But what I've always appreciated about our investors is they know it very well. They know it very well, which allows us to have a very engaging, thoughtful conversation on that.

16:56Alex Lee: And so that's the bar that I have. I've seen certain investors who invest in a space. They're excited about a founder, but they don't really get it. and then it comes down to do they try to get it because they can they're very small individuals they try to get it so that they can have a productive conversation with you in the board meeting so that's how i think about it yes there's a fit element of how do we work well together so it's not unlike hiring an executive in many ways you're not hiring them though right they're going to sit on your board but is it going to pass the airplane what is it the airport test are you two going to be able to work well together through problems and can they be a thought partner in the way that you need them to be.

17:33Okay.

17:34Ben Murray: Yeah. Appreciate the insight from the other side of the table. Let's talk go-to-market. One of my favorite topics as a CFO. So tell us, Curly, how are you finding your prospects? How do you get in front of CFOs, controllers, or even say accounting or bookkeeping firms?

17:47Alex Lee: Yeah. I don't know if we're doing anything that unique on this front. So I think it's a matter of executing very well with the playbooks that CFO will get in front of the CFO. So the first thing is we're fortunate to have very good inbound. Maybe this comes from me just being very buzzy and noisy on LinkedIn in the early days. So we had a solid foundation of SEO and then we have a growth leader who came in and really took it to a whole nother level. So a lot of inbound. The second is we really believe in providing knowledge and education, really helping the market understand how to think about AI and accounting.

18:25Alex Lee: One great thing about working with accountants is they love to learn. They love to learn. The CPE system is, I think, perhaps systemic elements of that. You have to keep learning to keep up. And so we do regular webinars with a lot of different banks to provide more value to their CFO customers. Because these banks are working with CFOs who want to learn more about AI. That's been a very effective go-to-market for us in partnering with the various banking partners. Otherwise, lastly, conferences, accountants, controllers, CFOs do go to conferences to buy software. And the last one that we're starting to touch on is partnerships.

19:01So I don't think any of those are, like, it's nothing that no one else would know.

19:06Alex Lee: It's a matter of, can you execute that to a very high level of quality?

19:10Ben Murray: Yeah, yeah, it makes sense. And I appreciate that. That's very clear. And what about, say, the partnership piece? Is there some traction you can get, say, if you integrate to a Sage Intact or NetSuite and becoming partners within their ecosystems? Is that a channel that can drive traffic?

19:26Alex Lee: Yes, it does. And I think how successful you are here requires a lot of invest, perhaps thought or creativity. So in our case, being on the Sage Intact marketplace has brought us several deals, has brought us several opportunities. these are companies who are on stage and active looking at the marketplace to solve a certain problem. They saw us as a solution for it. And then they came to us to learn more. And we've gotten many deals won that way. Is the marketplace a consistent source? I wouldn't say so. It's one tool in the belt. But when it comes to these partnerships, there's various tiers.

20:04Alex Lee: And that's the thing about partnerships that I'm still learning a lot about. On one end of the spectrum, you could say just a marketing partnership, right? You launch a partnership, quote unquote, a press release saying we work together, but it says that we work well together and maybe we do a couple of deals together. Okay. On the other end of the spectrum, M &A is a partnership. A full-on buyout of the company is a version of the partnership. And then there's everything in between a minority investment, cross-selling, quota retiring, product integrations. And so when I think about partnerships as a go-to-market strategy, the challenging thing becomes which companies does it make sense to partner with both ways?

20:49Alex Lee: Do they want to partner with us and do we want to partner with them? My proxy for this has been, it's simply been, if it's not dead obvious, it probably isn't there. Because the partnership is a hard enough problem to figure it out. If that partnership is not dead obvious, probably isn't there. And then the second part after you figure out the company is which of these channels seems to make sense. And that's where a lot of the work comes into play. That's why partnership leaders are very hard to find. This is a very complicated problem to solve.

21:19Ben Murray: Yeah, it definitely takes some work. And I kind of like that general rule of thumb about it. If it's obvious, then maybe it'll make sense. Now, you're driving prospects, you're driving lead flow through these channels. Tell us a little about your pricing model, because that's, of course, the great debate in the AI world now is pricing. So how are you, like, not exactly the, the exact pricing, but the pricing mechanics.

21:39Alex Lee: The philosophy behind it. Yeah. We actually, so the way we price is we equip your users with agents. So it's on a per user model with a certain amount of usage that you get out of it. We try not to price off by tokens because I think that gives a lot of people anxiety, but rather by call it a month-end flows task that we help you complete, or reporting tasks that we help you complete. So it's a per user plus usage on top of it, which happens to kind of be consistent with tools like Anthropic. Right. You buy an Anthropic plus subscription, you pay for a user, say yourself, and you get this much usage.

22:19Alex Lee: And if you use it up, you start paying over fees or you upgrade yourself to the next tier. But even here, if you exceed your usage, you're paying over fees. So very similar model for us. We equip users with accountants, you get this much usage out of it, and we exceed it, then those are upsell opportunities.

22:37Ben Murray: Interesting, because, yeah, if you think about those larger accounting teams, if you have accounts who are focused on maybe I'm handling all the debt entries and I'm handling the revenue entries, so basically equipping each of these accounts with their own agent, so kind of deflects us on just the size of the accounting team, plus then, of course, their usage. Exactly, that's right. Okay. And then I'm curious, Alex, with your engineering background, a lot of math involved there. At this stage of the business, do you have a favorite number or metric or maybe several metrics that you use to guide the business?

23:09Alex Lee: So, yes, I tell all my executives, yes, you may be managers, but you're all full time ICs as well. So everyone owns a number from a IC lens as well as management lens. Like most companies, we think a lot about closed one and our AR growth rate. But then the metric that I spend a lot of time looking at is how are we accelerating the compounding of value of our customers? How are we accelerating the compounding of value for our customers? We can get you to the first value, like we complete one closed task. But how fast can we get you to completing 50 closed tasks with us and generating 20 reports with us, right?

23:46Alex Lee: That's the metric that I'm thinking a lot about. Because that means we're driving tremendous customer value. Customers are exceptionally happy with us because they're just giving us more and more work. there was one case a firm over in the east coast one of the accountants pinged us recently and said this client that they onboarded last what was it last month onto us she finished everything in an hour for that client finished everything in an hour she dropped us a little message saying how pleased she was with that naturally we circulated that internally we had a little celebration for it but that's one client many use cases and we want to do that for firms more clients more use cases, but corporate accounting teams in-house, more use cases as well.

24:28Yeah.

24:28Ben Murray: Yeah. I love that. I love that. At some point, it's just going to be part of the close process. So Alex, appreciate the time today. A few stats and figures before we wrap up. Do you have a headquarters location? San Francisco. Okay. San Francisco. And what's your current team size?

24:43Alex Lee: We are close to 40 people. I'm not sure. Yeah.

24:47Ben Murray: About 40 people. Okay. Around 40. And anything you want to share around sense scale, AR ranges, revenue ranges? Probably not. Not? Okay, we'll keep that quiet for now. Yeah, Alex, appreciate the time. Love the conversation. I came up through the ranks of FP &A, but of course closed the books many times. So love the close process and just that accuracy and the timeliness of close. We're in August here of 2026. So what's top of mind for the rest of the year? Anything that's keeping you up at night, whether good or bad, thinking about the rest of the year and what you need to execute on?

25:19Alex Lee: It's a little bit arrogant to say the excitement is keeping you up at night. Sorry, it's a little bit of a lame answer, but yeah, there's a lot of energy and enthusiasm for what it is that we can achieve for our customers. I don't know, if I were to say what's coming up at night, if I were to zoom out a little bit and think about the broader market, is the amount of infrastructure we invested in AI infrastructure, are we keeping up with that? That might be the only thought, but when it comes to our world and building AI for accountants, I think it's such an exciting time. accountants and CFOs.

25:52Alex Lee: Controllers and CFOs are both on board. We're seeing a lot of reception and I think it's all tailwinds for all of us ahead of us.

26:00Ben Murray: Yeah, that's great. And I'm sure every founder is thinking about AI infrastructure and how that evolves so fast. And who knew for CFOs and controllers in the office of finance, like how much investment would go into the back office. So of course we love it. Alex, appreciate the conversation today. I know a lot of my listeners, CFOs, controllers will want to check out TrueWin. Where should we send them online to learn more?

26:21Alex Lee: Yeah, thanks, Fen. If you go to TrueWin.ai, that's our website. You can book a demo and learn more there. I'll also drop my email is alex at tryTrueWin.com. TryTrueWin.com. Drop me a note. Tell me you heard of us at the Fenmure web podcast, and I'll make sure I respond.

26:42Ben Murray: All right, perfect. So we'll put those in the show notes, but truewind.ai and alexatrytruewind.ai. And Alex, appreciate sharing your journey, experience, and look forward to following you. Thanks, Ben. Cheers. Cheers.