At his previous job, Bryan Shupe said he saw how enhanced financial reporting could change the trajectory of a business. But in a consulting role, he thought the incentives laid more with billing for hours than driving outcomes.
Since helping launch Dallas startup OverlayAnalytics, an end-to-end data analytics and financial reporting platform, in 2019, the company has seen some changes. It’s also seen recent validation, being named the winner of cloud data giant Snowflake’s inaugural Startup Challenge, which will help support OverlayAnalytics as it aims to raise its seed round of funding.
“Our thesis was traditional financial reporting hasn’t evolved much in the past 100 years,” Shupe, who serves as co-founder and CEO, said. “Most of the technology that’s out there today does a really good job at capturing and consolidating transaction-level data, but they typically fail at extracting the insights that are necessary so that leaders can make real-time decisions.”
Last year, the publicly traded Snowflake put out a call for an early-stage SaaS startup using its data cloud technology to apply for the competition. After making it through several rounds, OverlayAnalytics beat hundreds of other companies across more than 50 countries to be named the winner. Shupe said Snowflake is now looking to invest up to $250,000 in the startup via its venture arm with that honor.
“Giving us some of that credibility and having what we would consider our North Star company, Snowflake really lending their support in both dollars, as well as expertise, is incredibly valuable,” Shupe said.
Shupe said the funding from Snowflake Ventures would represent a portion of a $2.5 million seed round OverlayAnalytics is planning to kick off by the end of the month. If successful, the raise would bring the startup’s total to about $4 million.
Aimed at mid-market firms, OverlayAnalytics’ platform was built to connect to any system, automating data extraction to provide real-time insights and actionable visualizations of their financial reports.
“Our tools essentially democratize the use of data and analytics, and it gives the everyday company the same tools that the Fortune 100 company has on a much smaller budget,” said Michael Nguyen, an OverlayAnalytics board member.
When the company first launched in 2019, Shupe said OverlayAnalytics started with a traditional consulting firm's go-to-market strategy. However, with client feedback, he said the company realized they were interested in the software framework is used to create financial reporting models. Eventually, the company’s 15-person team sought to provide software that could deliver across industries and firms.
“It’s not enough just to move data from one place to the next, and it’s not enough just to model it or just to visualize it,” Shupe said. “Unless all three of those aspects come together in a way that leverages each, it produces a meaningless output at the end.”
Shupe said OverlayAnalytics' focus on mid-market businesses is because he sees it providing the most value when companies have grown more sophisticated but don’t have the amount of capital to compete with larger firms. He said clients range from industries spanning aerospace manufacturing and automotive companies to D2C businesses and food distribution, most of which have revenues ranging between $200 million to $600 million. He added that while the pandemic has increased interest in OverlayAnalytics’ technology, as companies look for a digital way to drive insights, an increasing portion of their business comes from private equity firms.
“Aside from all of the social impacts, business-wise (the pandemic has) been a watershed moment for a lot of firms. They’ve really woken up and recognized the need for real-time enhanced financial reporting,” Shupe said. “Just the immediate need for updated and accurate information to manage these trying times is rising on people’s priority level.”
