Artificial intelligence startup Runway Financial Inc. said today it has decided to pivot away from accounting software and rebrand itself as cfo.ai.

That decision marks the launch of its new flagship product, an AI agent called Ari that’s designed to act as a chief financial officer for startup founders and independent business owners. Ari is designed to ease the workload on busy founders, which it does by proactively monitoring their finances.

The move marks a significant pivot for the startup, which was founded in 2020 as an AI-native accounting software firm, primarily focused on automating financial planning and modeling. While the original platform aimed to make accounting easier, cfo.ai takes that concept much further, acting as an always-on virtual CFO that can deal with virtually all financial matters.

To get started, founders can simply integrate Ari with their current financial tools and customer relationship platforms, such as NetSuite, QuickBooks, Stripe, Salesforce or Snowflake. Once it’s up and running, Ari will build and maintain a complete model of the businesses’ financial health. Founders will then be able to communicate with it via Slack and ask it to perform virtually any finance-related task. For instance, they could ask it to forecast their cash flow or analyze a hiring plan to understand its impact. Because Ari is constantly monitoring key financial metrics such as recurring revenue, cash flow, churn, profit margins and earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, it can quickly generate an accurate answer or forecast.

Ari works proactively too. By monitoring those same metrics, it can alert the founder if it spots a sudden jump in churn or notices that the available cash flow is lower than expected. It will investigate the reasons why, and then suggest ideas to try and rectify the situation, just like a human CFO would try to do.

Founder and Chief Executive Siqi Chen said the main difference between Ari and AI-enabled accounting tools is its ability to properly understand things like Excel spreadsheets, which can be tricky for traditional large language models to wrap their algorithms around. “LLMs can already handle a lot of the simpler work in finance, including accounting and reporting, but they struggle with forecasting,” he said. “The problem is structural. Spreadsheets were designed around how humans see and work, not how LLMs work.”

Ari’s secret sauce is Reambase, which Chen said is a proprietary multidimensional calculation engine designed specifically to help AI agents navigate through spreadsheets. The challenge is that Excel spreadsheets employ a grid system, where the meaning of a specific cell depends on its visual position, such as B7 or G12. AI agents struggle to reconstruct these meanings because they can’t “see” in the same way that humans can.

Reambase operates differently, Chen explained. It ditches the visual grid and assigns values to cells based on business addresses constructed from named variables and dimensions, such as “Region,” “Month” or “Customer.” Doing it this way means that the semantic meaning of each cell travels with its value, so AI agents can instantly understand the logic and context, while Reambase handles the underlying formulas.

By using this multidimensional structure, Ari is able to go further than standard LLMs and act much more like a human CFO. “A chatbot waits for you to ask it something, but that’s not how a CFO works,” Chen explained. “A CFO keeps track of the business, notices when something changes, figures out why and then brings it to you. Ari works the same way, while giving founders direct access to the model so they can understand what’s happening and dig into the numbers themselves.”

Images: cfo.ai