Our Journey to Brightflow AI
Growing up, I watched my father relentlessly struggle with his business’ finances. He owned a small store, which was our family’s livelihood. My father’s desire to drive positive change and forge his own path, inspired him to start his business. However, as a small business owner, he had limited access to information, which made understanding and managing his business’ finances very difficult as it either required long hours of tedious work or a heavy capital commitment. Without a heavy time or capital commitment, and a lack of resources that would help with consistent monitoring and precise planning, my father struggled to manage his finances while also keeping up with his responsibilities as a business owner, father, husband, and fellow human. Thus, at a very young age, I realized the daunting financial challenges and risks that small businesses face daily.
As I began my career in finance, I learned that we live in a data-driven world, where success is dictated by one’s ability to access information. Smaller companies do not have access to the institutional knowledge and tools that are at the fingertips of large corporations. I witnessed this vast discrepancy in information, when I first started working for large corporations that had various financing options, and armies of financial experts with an extensive knowledge base at their beckoning call. Unfortunately, these financial tools are only accessible to those that have the money to access them.
When I started my first company, Suiteness, I had the full finance arsenal. While these tools helped me manage my finances efficiently, they were always expensive, painful to implement, and hard to access. Even with all the financial knowledge I possess, I was struggling to keep up with the finances at my company. It was in that moment that I knew I had to break this cycle of informational arbitrage and invisible barriers. I believed in creating a better, more efficient way of handling business finances. A way that did not involve requiring my company’s engineering team to build connections with financial information providers (banks, shopify, quickbooks), did not require me to spend countless hours building passive excel models to represent each scenario, or invest $100K+ in to access financial services from platforms like Anaplan, Host Analytics.
I met my cofounder Jeffrey, who shared the same passion and believed in creating simple, easy to use tools to democratize information, and disrupt the system, in which open access to information is only available to the wealthy. For us, finance was the answer to this democratization and disruption. In our daily lives, we have a multitude of options to manage finances including financial advisory services from banks, but we do not have access to similar tools to help manage our small businesses. Thus, in order to erase informational arbitrage and the discrepancy in access to information between small businesses and large corporations, we must build a tool that provides small businesses with the same services and financial planning tools as fortune 500 companies.
We live in a dynamic world that is constantly making technological advances. Today, with the help of pre-build online store fronts, people are able to build businesses faster than ever before, and with a much lower capital investment requirement. The inputs that were so hard to assess are now in the form of APIs, an easy to use interface, and we can build a truly transparent, predictive and simple platform for any type of online business owner or stakeholder, which will allow them to truly take control of their finances and cash. That is why we started Brightflow AI: to reduce the fear of not knowing what will happen, to plan for unforeseen events such as COVID, recessions, and market shocks, and to make sure that, as a stakeholder, you have the data needed to make actionable decisions. We want to take the hordes of financial data sitting in a passive state in excel, and make it “active”, so it is a part of your life, and not a burden.
Our promise is to be your advocate, and build a product that allows you to manage your business successfully and efficiently. Our mission is to truly bring those big-company financial tools to the everyday business owner. We want to make sure you have the tools that will allow you to detect changes in your finances, so that you have an unfair advantage in making your business a success. Our promise is to do whatever we can to help make financial management easier and more efficient for small business owners. In the end, our goal is to create a tool that consistently, autonomously, and proactively monitors your finances at a price point that is less than an hour of your accountants time, so that you can get your time back and sleep better at night knowing.
We look forward to having you with us on this journey to fully autonomous financial monitoring for your cash, your business, your lifeline.
Co-Founder & CEO | Brightflow AI
