Indian American CTO Pranav Ravella calls Sapien “an insanely cool idea with the best people I know,” as he, Ron Nachum, and Arya Grayeli launch their AI startup at age 20.
Sapien, a platform that offers AI coworkers for finance professionals, raised $8.7 million in a seed funding round on Tuesday.
The investment was led by General Catalyst with significant contribution from startup accelerator Neo. Additional angel investors include Bryan Baum of K5 Ventures; Russell Kaplan, president at Cognition; Claire Hughes Johnson, corporate officer and advisor at Stripe; Sabrina Hahn of SH Fund; and Scott Belsky, Behance founder and chief strategy officer at Adobe.
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Sapien uses AI to create “autonomous coworkers” to tackle complex tasks related to company financials and streamline workflows, making days worth of work done in minutes. The startup claims that its platform is the “most advanced autonomous coworker for financial analysis at enterprises,” and plans on building a “shadow Chief Financial Officer (CFO)” in the future.
An AI-native system built from the ground up that integrates with Excel, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, that’s how Sapien describes its AI coworkers. The autonomous coworker breaks down and analyzes complex financial data of the organization, and enables financial professionals to challenge the service’s every assumption as it makes the tool learn more about the organization.
According to the company, some examples where Sapien can be used are healthcare – Sapien can evaluate revenue and visit trends across hundreds of clinics to provide actionable growth recommendations. In manufacturing companies, Sapien can analyze a year’s worth of raw transaction data across dozens of plants to uncover key impacts, and reduce over 100 hours of manual work to five minutes of supervising the AI coworker.
The fresh capital will help ship powerful product iterations to customers, continue building a team of product-obsessed AI researchers, and push the limits of what’s possible in this space, the company added.
Sapien is the brainchild of three high school friends from Northern Virginia – CEO Ron Nachum, CTO Pranav Ravella and chief scientist Arya Grayeli. The 20-year olds got together to focus on their startup, and even went as far as dropping out of prestigious universities to do so.
Nachum attended Harvard while Ravella went with Stanford and Grayeli became a student at the University of Texas at Austin.
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“I did learn a lot at Stanford, but I also wanted to build products,” Ravella told Fortune in an exclusive interview.
Forgoing academia for forging a path of their own, the trio stressed on the importance of building a startup with people you candidly trust.
“It’s an insanely cool idea with the best people that I know,” Ravella said. “They’re also just as crazy as me,” he added.