SoftBank Backs Startup for Interactive Accounting Tools

(Bloomberg) -- SoftBank Vision Fund led a $65 million funding round for finance and accounting platform Digits Financial Inc., which is rolling out its first major product on Thursday.

The latest investment, which included participation from GV, the venture capital arm of Alphabet Inc., and Benchmark Capital, brings the San Francisco-based startup’s valuation to $565 million.

With Digits Reports, accountants get automatically generated reports that can be customized with features including the ability to drag and drop in charts and auto-filling numbers using Excel-style formulas. The reports are interactive, allowing companies to hover over values in traditional financial statements and balance sheets to view additional insights about numbers, like historical trends or top vendors. Wayne Chang, a co-founder, said the product has saved accountants around 4 hours per client on monthly reports.

Normally, the finance team would have to manually calculate all the different charts, figure out who the top vendors are and look for insights to pull to show clients, Chang said in an interview. “With Digits Reports, one click and it just generates it all.”

Chang said the company has spent the last three years trying to develop a “living model” that can understand and respond to the real-world impacts of changes in a business’ finances. The model serves as the basis for Digits Search, a search engine for financial data launched last year, Digits Reports and an upcoming product launching in June.

Digits was founded in 2018 by Chang and Jeff Seibert. The duo previously created Crashlytics, a mobile analytics platform acquired by Twitter Inc. in 2013 and then sold to Alphabet Inc.’s Google.

Eylul Kayin, an investor at SoftBank’s Vision Fund, said Digits’ services also are applicable to the Vision Fund’s other portfolio companies.

“It’s rare for one of the portfolio companies to be valuable to the others,” Kayin said in the statement. 

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