Building the always-on finance team: Our investment in Maximor

Finance leaders are at the heart of their business’s strategic conversations, tasked with forecasting the future, advising the CEO, and shaping major business decisions. Yet behind the scenes, their teams are trapped in a mess of manual processes and outdated tools. 

Despite decades of investment in accounting software and ERPs, closing the books each month still often feels like a race through a maze of Excel spreadsheets. The average finance stack is a patchwork of ERP, CRM, payroll, and billing systems that don’t reliably speak to one another. Finance professionals spend hours stitching data together and reconciling disparate numbers instead of analyzing and interpreting them. 

If finance is to fulfill its strategic promise, it needs a fundamentally different approach.

Services as software, applied to finance

At Foundation Capital, we’ve been investing behind the shift from traditional SaaS to services as software (SaS), which we first described last April. Instead of providing marginal productivity gains, SaS products deliver outcomes. It’s automation that acts like a service (end-to-end execution) while scaling like software (24/7 uptime and instant deployments). The SaS model is redefining how software creates value, and Maximor applies it directly to the CFO’s office.

How this automation is delivered matters. In one corner, software incumbents (Oracle, Sage, Intuit) are bolting AI features onto legacy products, making incremental tweaks to decades-old architecture. In another, a new crop of startups is selling “AI copilots for finance” and point solutions that tackle isolated tasks. A few attempt to replace the entire ERP outright.

Maximor stands apart in its approach. It sits on top of the tools finance teams already use – ERP suites, payroll, billing, CRM, banking – and unifies them into a single, reconciled source of truth. By tapping into every corner of a company’s financial data, Maximor’s AI agents perform complete finance workflows automatically and continuously. Their software doesn’t demand that teams rip out their existing stack; it simply does the work behind the scenes, producing audit trails and checkable work by default. Finance teams get the equivalent of an AI staff that works tirelessly and accurately within their current systems.

In doing so, Maximor is tackling a horizontal problem that affects nearly every mid-sized and enterprise company. The opportunity is massive: the global “Office of the CFO” software market reached $52B in 2023 and is forecast to grow at 13% annually through 2028. Most finance departments worldwide still rely on manual effort and ad-hoc spreadsheets to manage their books. Bringing intelligent automation to this domain will create a step-change improvement in how fast, accurately, and strategically companies can run their finances.

We’ve seen this pattern before. Our investment in Eightfold reimagined HR as a service delivered through software, transforming a universal back-office function by automating repetitive work and freeing human teams to focus on judgment and strategy. We see Maximor as carrying that same approach into finance.

Deeply technical founders who’ve lived the problem

CEO Ramnandan (“Ram”) Krishnamurthy and CTO Ajay Krishna Amudan met as undergraduates at IIT Madras, where Ram graduated at the top of his class and Ajay was an ACM-ICPC world finalist. As an IIT alum, I know firsthand the caliber of technical talent and entrepreneurial drive that emerges from this network, and I’m always eager to back entrepreneurs that emerge from it.

Ram and Ajay went on to spend over a decade at Microsoft, where they worked on global finance transformation projects and rebuilt Microsoft’s internal finance platform. After witnessing Fortune 500 finance teams pour millions into software only to end up back in Excel firefighting, Ram and Ajay knew there had to be a better way. Maximor was born from their firsthand conviction that finance automation could be done differently, with a true systems-level approach.

Our journey with Ram and Ajay began at a long dinner that was supposed to be a quick meeting. Six hours later, Jaya and I were struck not only by their clarity of thought and technical acumen, but also by their empathy for the end user: they spoke about CFOs and finance teams with the earned understanding of insiders. We decided shortly after that we wanted to be their day-zero partners.

A new chapter for the CFO’s office

Maximor is emerging from stealth and announcing its $9M seed round, and we couldn’t be more proud to lead it. Backing highly technical founders with deep domain expertise from the very earliest stages is the core of our investment strategy. We feel fortunate to be Ram and Ajay’s partners from day zero, and we’re thrilled to support them on the road ahead. 

Every company, from mid-market up to the Fortune 500, stands to benefit from an AI-powered finance team that works tirelessly in the background. We believe Maximor can be that catalyst in countless organizations.

To learn more, visit maximor.ai. And if you’re an early-stage founder building in the services-as-software space, reimagining how essential work gets done, we’d love to hear from you!