Ascend’s clientele include companies like Slope, a B2B payment platform backed by OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Pleo, one of the largest B2B spend management and credit card providers in Europe, Rho, Evergrow and others
By Ada Jain
Y Combinator-backed Accend launched Monday a new financial statement spreading and analysis platform, guaranteeing 100% accuracy and powered by AI and human-in-the-loop review, saving time and money.
In July 2024, the SaaS startup raised $3.2 million in seed capital from Y Combinator, Adverb Ventures, General Catalyst, 645 Ventures, as well as angels from Brex, Stripe, and Carta, to “reinvent fintech operations and compliance workflows.”
Ascend claims to be on a mission to help fintechs and banks accelerate their business customers’ onboarding processes using AI.
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Founded in 2023 by Pranjal Daga, and Yutong Pei, who experienced firsthand the frustrations of manual, tedious financial reviews through leading Product and Engineering on the Fraud Risk team at Brex. The third co-founder Joseph Tianshi Zhou joined the duo, prior to which he was the CFO of a mobile gaming startup.
Co-founder and co-CEO Daga was named among the Top 25 B2B SaaS Founders List of 2024 by Capchase, a revenue accelerating platform whose capital solution, for Accend.
“Across financial institutions, analysts spend hours manually spreading and analyzing financial statements, slowing down approvals and inflating operational costs. This isn’t just a minor inconvenience; it’s a billion-dollar inefficiency affecting banks, fintechs, insurers and lenders globally. We knew there had to be a better way—one where accuracy meets speed,” Daga wrote in a blog on Y Combinator.
Furthermore, the founders believe that the process of conducting due diligence while onboarding a new business onto a fintech or banking platform is currently painstakingly complex, repetitive, and as a result, extremely prone to human error. This creates a paradox of innovation held back by tradition, led by Business Process Outsourcing providers’ (BPOs) like Accenture and IBM among others. Accend is geared to disrupt this norm by tackling the key pain points across risk operations and compliance using AI.
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Their unique selling proposition includes delivering up to 10 times faster credit memos while underscoring the significance of higher value activities. Citing compliance as a high value activity—Coinbase’s example is the apt lesson, a U.S based crypto exchange, which was recently penalized at $100 million by New York regulators which includes $50 million dedicated to compliance measures.
Ascend’s clientele include companies like Slope, a B2B payment platform backed by OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Pleo, one of the largest B2B spend management and credit card providers in Europe, Rho, Evergrow and others who have reduced application processing time by 80% with Accend, significantly enhancing their credit underwriting and onboarding efficiency.