Startup Explore

Giedrius Daubaris (00:00)
So what we're building is AI agents for the contract to cash

essentially we're rethinking finance automation and how finance teams, especially lean ones in the startup world, perform some of the core

The way we see the vision for the company is really expanding into a unified, ⁓ agenda automation platform for the office of the CFO.

Ali | Startup Explore (00:27)
Meet Giedrius Daubaris the CEO and co-founder of Exante, a seed stage startup that is building AI agents for the entire contract to cash cycle, helping modern finance teams to intelligently automate complex billing, streamline accounts receivable management, and accelerate cash flow. Let's begin.

Ali | Startup Explore (00:46)
Giedrius, thank you so much for coming to the show. Really excited to have you.

Giedrius Daubaris (00:49)
Of course, thank you for having me. I was looking forward to this.

Ali | Startup Explore (00:53)
Awesome. Well, first of all, congrats on your recent fundraising. ⁓ I believe it's a very important and strategic milestone. So congrats on that.

Giedrius Daubaris (00:57)
Thank you.

Appreciate it. I appreciate it.

Ali | Startup Explore (01:03)
All right, so let's dive in. Can you tell me what you're building and what is that big problem that you're trying to solve?

Giedrius Daubaris (01:10)
Absolutely. ⁓ So what we're building is AI agents for the contract to cash cycle.

know Ali, you're in the finance world, so you'll understand exactly what that means. But for anyone else listening, essentially we're rethinking finance automation and how finance teams, especially lean ones in the startup world, perform some of the core functions of the finance and accounting workloads,

in particular with the focus of converting

the customer contracts into cash. So essentially accounts receivable automation, anything to do from contract interpretation to billing to ⁓ accounts receivable management and collections.

Ali | Startup Explore (01:51)
Yeah, thank you. So for the audience, ⁓ can you maybe give a high level overview of that contract to cash cycle end to end and maybe kind of highlight where specifically Exante helps in that workflow?

Giedrius Daubaris (02:06)
Absolutely. So I think just taking a step back really and looking at what the finance function does, it's very often a centralized function, right? It will support anyone from across the organization, from product sales to anything like that. And by that nature, they end up relying on a lot of data that is held by, you know, completely other teams, whether it's legal and the CLM software, whether it's sales team and the CRM.

whether it's anyone else. And essentially they have to bring all of this data together to perform all sorts of work. So you'll often see, and I'm sure you're used to playing spreadsheet jungle yourself of just trying to bring the data together and make sense of it. And when it comes to something like billing, not only do you need to pull in the relevant contract and the contract data and to understand how to exactly build the customer, but then translate into the billing schedules.

invoices, make sure that the customers pay and so on. So if I had to identify, let's say, key building blocks of that process. So first of all, you're looking at the contract itself to understand exactly what's inside of that contract and how you turn it into something that's actionable. know, sales people, especially if you look into the market now, everyone's trying to sign whatever deals they can get. Right. And that often means ⁓ increasingly complex ⁓

payment terms, increasingly complex products and structuring. And once it lands on someone in finance and operations desk, they have to figure out exactly how to turn that into invoices. So here we use AI agents for that automatic data extraction interpretation to eliminate that step of someone having to do that interpretation ⁓ altogether. You then jump into the billing of actually having to issue the invoices. And very often,

For those teams, it's a manual configuration, whether they rely on QuickBooks as an ERP or NetSuite or something like that, folks spend a bunch of time actually creating manually those invoices ⁓ in those systems, which is not rocket science, but it's very time intensive and ⁓ accuracy requiring process. So in that case, we again use AI to automatically generate all upcoming invoices to eliminate that ⁓ manual work.

And then once you issue the invoices to your customers, you have to track those payments and in some cases, collect them when they become overdue. Right. And so in this case, a lot of companies ⁓ rely on just automatic payment reminders or something like that. And what we see in many cases is that often it's not enough. Sometimes those payment reminders land in boxes that no one's potentially monitoring.

Sometimes they're going somewhere else completely. And it often requires a manual intervention for someone to go in with a personalized approach, tackle that. And so we automate those reminders in a much more intelligent way by taking into account the customer history, the payment history, all of these additional ⁓ data points that allow us to do this more effectively. And really the idea throughout this process is to not only cut out the manual workflows,

through all these different steps, but also provide an extra visibility and data centralization so that finance teams don't have to ⁓ do all this work and play this pratyjanga to accomplish what is one of the most important things for a company to get cash into the bank account.

Ali | Startup Explore (05:45)
Yeah, I definitely hear you ⁓ as a finance guy in finance, you get this special seat where you have visibility across multiple, all of the functions basically. And one of your main tasks is being able to centralize all of the company data because then you can drive so much insight from all of that data. But to your point, like as the companies grow, especially like mid-stage growth stage companies, a lot of their data lives in like PDFs.

Giedrius Daubaris (06:04)
Absolutely.

Ali | Startup Explore (06:13)
⁓ that are spread across different folders, different computers and so on. ⁓ sounds like one of the key features of Exante is basically being able to centralize all of that contract insights ⁓ in one place and automatically pull all of the key terms from the PDFs. Is that right?

Giedrius Daubaris (06:20)
Mm-hmm.

That's absolutely correct. And we, at least at Xanti, see the contract as the ultimate source of truth. know, some companies rely on CRM. We all know how it happens, how it goes with the hygiene of CRM and so on. That data is never perfect, but the contract is the ultimate source of truth where that information lives. We take an extra step forward and not only think about, can we extract and capture that information? But then can we use that information to perform work?

Ali | Startup Explore (06:41)
⁓ Yeah, right.

Right.

Yeah. So before I start double clicking on those key features, let me ask you this. What's the benefit to the business of proactive contract management? And maybe if you can call out some of the risks associated with being reactive in this process.

Giedrius Daubaris (07:21)
Absolutely. think one of the ways to maybe frame this, I recently had a conversation with a successful multiple times founder who sold his company to Plaid, et cetera. And he called it, he labeled it as the series B reckoning ⁓ from the perspective that as you're in the early stages, all you really care about is that top line growth, right? And companies invest a lot into sales organization, into engineering organization while requiring those very lean teams

Ali | Startup Explore (07:29)
Mm-hmm.

Giedrius Daubaris (07:50)
⁓ in GNA to do more with less. And so it's when they come to Series B that someone actually takes a step back and looks at the process to find that many contracts are missing. Some of them have maybe missed invoices and it has direct impact on the cash flow. So when we first ⁓ started the company and named it Exante, that means from the Latin language, ⁓ acting before the event, we're being provided

Ali | Startup Explore (08:20)
Interesting. That's very thoughtful.

Giedrius Daubaris (08:21)
⁓ Yeah,

yeah, and so this is the kind of philosophy that we approach this with, right? Can we get in front of some of those issues or risks ahead of time so that this series B reckoning, I guess, is not as painful ⁓ as it could be.

Ali | Startup Explore (08:39)
yeah, I definitely came across some of those issues that you've highlighted there. ⁓ Let me double click on some of the key features now. Let's start with this automated data extraction and AI prompts. What would be some of the use cases like with those AI prompts? Can you pull certain like one-off clauses from any contracts, any PDFs and so on?

Giedrius Daubaris (08:51)
Mm-hmm.

Absolutely. think when it comes to the extraction of data and data capture, the immediate benefit is you can capture more data and structure it ⁓ than you would if you were to rely on the sales team or anyone else to provide it in the CRM or anything like that. So on top of just extracting what's already stated explicitly in the contract, such as the effective date, start date, signature date, anything along those lines,

The ability to understand the language in the contract really allows you to capture some of the dates that might not be explicitly stated, such as renewal date, such as opt out dates, anything like that. But on top of that, highlight and extract certain legal clauses that you might need to care about as a financial operations professional in managing that contract. Is it an auto renewing clause? Does it have any pricing restrictions? Anything that could impact your approach to

the renewals process to getting more cash out of the contract and so on. So I think there's one level of extracting the information that's relatively basic and sort of table stakes. But the second level is really providing that level of actionable information, such as product line items, billing terms, ⁓ frequency, and so on, that then you can actually use to automate work that usually you have to provide as an input manually.

Ali | Startup Explore (10:28)
Yeah. To your point about the product line items and skews can Exante pull product level data from the order forms that, and for the context for the audience, usually what happens is that companies sell a lot of products and then all of that product skew level data lives in just PDFs that get attached to Salesforce. And then if you want to go look back for the last two years and be able to say, Hey, what products I sold,

you need to kind of manually go through all of those PDFs and try to pull the quantity, the price, the discounts for each of those SKUs. ⁓ So I'm curious if Exaunte can pull product level data as well.

Giedrius Daubaris (11:10)
Yeah, absolutely. And I think we see some of the companies try to get ahead of it by using CPQ software, right? To kind of determine their product catalog and their pricing catalog to then try and get on top of this chaos. We're essentially saying, look, don't worry about that. Sign the contracts as you would structure ⁓ in a way that it gets the deal done, but then pass it on to us and we'll extract the information, tag the ⁓ SKUs together, which then to your point allows you to

dive into deeper reporting onto sort of product by product line items, their trends and so on, which again, eliminates the manual effort and provides you an extra level of visibility.

Ali | Startup Explore (11:52)
yeah, yeah. Once you have the product skew level data, it's like the type of analysis that you can do and the type of insights that you can bring to the exact level. It's really important. All right. So moving down the work process. So we've talked about kind of centralized place for the contracts, the AI prompt. Now let's maybe dive in into the billing and invoicing. So I know you mentioned that it basically automates that process. I'm curious to hear.

How do you ensure reliability and ⁓ accuracy of the data and whether humans come into play before those invoices get sent to customers?

Giedrius Daubaris (12:31)
That's a great question. And by the way, just taking a step back, invoicing is not something new, right? This has been probably around since ancient Greece. So you have companies and software out there that allows you to automate some level of billing. ⁓ You'll have solutions like ⁓ Maxio or Chargebee, et cetera, or even Stripe that are fantastic when you're automating relatively standardized ⁓ product, right? If you have three standard...

Ali | Startup Explore (12:51)
Mm-hmm.

Giedrius Daubaris (12:59)
pricing plans on a monthly basis on credit card, those ⁓ tools will address those needs. Where we step in is essentially when you're looking at contracts that are highly complex, they might be containing usage-based data, they might be containing different milestones and other things that really require that human interpretation or in our case, agentic interpretation that we can then translate into actual invoices. And to your point,

⁓ At every single point when we extract the information and present it structured, essentially we create invoices in the draft status, which is then for the user to actually verify that they are happy with the extraction and they're happy for the automation to proceed further. We call it sort of the human in the loop process here. And on top of that, to make our users, especially in the early days, more comfortable.

Ali | Startup Explore (13:40)
Mm-hmm.

Giedrius Daubaris (13:53)
we're also providing a sort of expert review window. Whenever you upload a contract within minutes, we'll have one of our experts review the contract information and just ensure that it's captured exactly correctly. So again, sharing that little bit of burden as everyone learns to trust the AI completely.

Ali | Startup Explore (13:57)
Mm-hmm.

Got it, that's interesting approach. ⁓ Okay, now moving to accounts receivables automation. How does Exanta help to speed up the collections and be more proactive in that space? Again, maybe if you can highlight the things that you do on top of like traditional tools.

Giedrius Daubaris (14:33)
Yeah, I think just like traditional tools in terms of parity, we will track the payment status ⁓ of your invoices, whether they're paid, whether they're overdue, et cetera. But I think where extra functionality comes in is we don't just send automated payment reminders because again, taking a step back, this is a highly sensitive workflow, right? You don't want to be sending automated reminders to high value customers.

Ali | Startup Explore (14:57)
yeah.

Giedrius Daubaris (15:01)
or send them something that might be potentially wrong or maybe not timely. If someone's in the customer success team is now working on an upsell, you definitely don't want to upset the customer by sending them a reminder. So what the Agenta capabilities allow us to do is to tap into additional sources of structured and unstructured information. We can check the ⁓ data to see what's the typical payment pattern.

for this customer, are they always late and therefore we should escalate the reminders sooner or whether this is a one-off and maybe we should hold off from those reminders. We can also interpret ongoing email communications and capture something like a promise date. If a customer promised to pay in a couple of weeks, we will not be sending the reminders ⁓ in that case. So it kind of operates like a human would in terms of taking that highly nuanced contextual information to...

Ali | Startup Explore (15:58)
Mm-hmm.

Giedrius Daubaris (16:00)
take a right action that's kind of good for all the stakeholders, right? But at the speed of software. So I'd say this is the thing that kind of differentiates our approach to accounts receivable automation in some ways.

Ali | Startup Explore (16:15)
Yeah, it's interesting how you've added that layer of intelligence on the top. And it's interesting to hear that it can basically integrate with the emails as well and be able to understand those, the context around that customer and billing and take actions, ⁓ respectively. ⁓

Giedrius Daubaris (16:35)
Absolutely.

I think to your point, as we talked about, it's not a rocket science of a process, but it's highly nuanced and the data that you depend to make decisions there is highly scattered. So if we can solve with agentic automation, its ability to reason and to access external business systems, you can really start getting that feeling of this being automated different to what was possible ever before.

Ali | Startup Explore (17:00)
Got it. Now that brings me to my next question. If I zoom out and look at the contract to cash cycle end to end, what system integrations with Exante would need to have can be in place as a best practice.

Giedrius Daubaris (17:16)
Yeah, I think two things come to mind, right? The first on the front end of the process, we integrate with the CRMs. So your HubSpot, your Salesforce, et cetera, because that's where the deals get closed one, right? And that's where the contracts get signed. So this is the alert for us. And then whenever the deal gets closed one on one of those CRM platforms, we ingest the information and either if the contract already exists there, ingest the contract as well, or ask the user.

to trigger the process by now uploading a contract for this specific situation. So essentially integration with the CRM allows us to monitor the deal activity and kickstart the billing process. The second the deal is done without waiting for weekly or monthly review process, that way accelerating cashflow even further. And on the back end, once you are able to go through this process, capture all the data,

perform revenue recognition and additional sort of reporting things, you might want to push that information into your ERP. think whether you're using NetSuite or QuickBooks or anything like that, I don't think that category as a software is going anywhere and will continue to serve as a system of record. It's just how do we actually populate that information in that system of record without all the manual effort that usually ⁓ comes with it.

So I would say those are the two core integrations that we're looking to expand further in.

Ali | Startup Explore (18:45)
Makes sense.

I was wondering about the technology, if you can speak to that and specifically being ⁓ agentic architecture, what that means for the contract to cash.

Giedrius Daubaris (18:55)
Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, we're hearing so much about AI agents and we're hearing about people launching just general ability agents. They're here at the society. We believe they do have to be highly domain specific, especially for high sensitivity tasks where the tolerance for risk is nearly zero. You have to really ⁓ focus on the core jobs to be done. And that requires structuring the agentic systems to achieve that.

So ⁓ the way we approach it, it's a multi-agent system that will collaborate between different agents to achieve relevant outcomes. So for example, we have the contract data extraction agent, right? Whenever it extracts the data, will actually, instead of just populating the data directly into the platform, it will send it onto the, what we call the QA agent that will be now comparing the extracted data against the contract as a.

Ali | Startup Explore (19:49)
Uh-huh.

Giedrius Daubaris (19:53)
as someone who sees it for the first time, et cetera. And this reasoning loop ensures much higher ⁓ accuracy of the information. And on top of that, we naturally always continue to iterate both with system and user prompts and do the A-B testing there to ensure that we can not only, as the models get extremely smarter over time, but also our specific way of approaching it.

leads to this higher and higher level of accuracy that's come to be expected, right, especially in the field like finance.

Ali | Startup Explore (20:31)
Got it. Got it. Now as a customer, I think one of the questions I would have is do I have a flexibility to pick whether my contracts will be stored on-prem versus my VPC, let's say.

Giedrius Daubaris (20:43)
And ⁓ here essentially as an early stage company, we're storing all of the customer data ⁓ in the AWS cloud. The servers here in the United States, making sure they're encrypted both in transit and at rest, because at the end of the day, we're asking our users to trust us with a highly sensitive data. ⁓ And so both the contract itself, but the contents...

within them, et cetera. it's slightly different from, I guess, more go-to-market automation solutions or anything like that that folks might be using and used to. And so that focus on security and confidentiality of the information is top of mind for us as well.

Ali | Startup Explore (21:34)
Got it, that's good to hear. Now I'm mindful that you guys are still early stage company, but let me ask you this. If you can share some of the key metrics around the market traction that you've been having so far, maybe like the user adoption or the type of customers that you've been lending, that would be interesting.

Giedrius Daubaris (21:52)
Absolutely. Now, as you point out, we're an early stage company, so we're always looking ⁓ to work with additional types of companies, et cetera, to figure out exactly where we land. But we're extremely excited to have been able to already add value to companies, both at the earliest stages, as well as more enterprise level clients. So just to give a couple of examples, we're working with FreshPaint. ⁓

There are ⁓ YC backed series B company that kind of are trying to get ahead of that series B reckoning, right? And automate some of those processes. But we're also working with maybe more mature companies such as Avionte who are P backed recruiting software company, et cetera. And we're seeing, we're seeing, think just in terms of the ICP, those two large buckets that we're kind of going after. On one hand, you have.

the startups and rapidly growing companies that are kind of experiencing that growth and their GNA teams might not necessarily be scaling at the same rate. So they're looking for agenda or even any automation solutions to get ahead of it. And then the other bucket, you have much larger enterprise customers that maybe have an entire 12 or 20 people department focused on that. And they're looking for efficiency gains and just

more process structuring that could help them unlock the leverage that AI can provide. So we're kind of seeing enough interest from both of those ⁓ pieces. And with that interest, think to your point, we've been able to recently raise our seed funding round from the Urban Innovation Fund, a fantastic team there who's been seeing our vision and trusting us to continue building on top of that ⁓ progress.

Ali | Startup Explore (23:40)
Yeah, those are exciting market attractions. ⁓ So I know we've covered a lot about the existing features today. Let me ask you this. What are some of the key features that you're most excited about to see in the near future?

Giedrius Daubaris (23:54)
Yeah, that's great question. think that's part of the exciting part of building is that there's always more to build. There's always the next big feature. I think as we built out the platform to launch it and start serving the initial customers, really a lot of the agentic automation and functionality is kind of in the backend, right? It's not as exposed to the customer because we're taking their data, we're doing all sorts of automation around it to enable these workloads.

But the next step for us is to really launch, and we're doing that in the next few weeks, is exposing what we call Dante from Exante, an AI agent that allows you to navigate the nine circles of accounts receivable hell

⁓ to actually be able to work with our app through the natural language, right? Through the natural language interface, whether it's asking it to perform ⁓ tasks, whether it's asking it to generate reports.

Just like you would with a junior employee on your accounts receivable or finance team, you will be able to interact with ⁓ our solution to generate more value faster, especially as it compounds over time.

Ali | Startup Explore (25:07)
Yeah, I cannot wait to see ⁓ penetration of AI agents into the finance field. I know finance has probably been lagging in AI adoption in general, just because of the nature of the work. There's kind of a zero, maybe near zero tolerance for risk on our end. But yeah.

Giedrius Daubaris (25:26)
Absolutely.

think the buyer, right, there's a CFO or a VP of finance. Very often it's a highly sophisticated buyer that's very ROI oriented, has a clear idea of what they think acceptable time to value is, et cetera. So in some ways this market is ripe for this kind of automation, but at the same time you have to build that trust over time. ⁓

Ali | Startup Explore (25:51)
Yeah. Yeah.

Giedrius Daubaris (25:52)
to showcase both the ROI and time to value and so on. So I ⁓ totally agree that there's ⁓ low room for tolerance for risk, but it also creates a massive opportunity.

Ali | Startup Explore (26:06)
Yeah, that's a great point. Now, let me take you back. ⁓ Can you talk about your background and your co-founder's background? Like what you guys did prior to Exante, what was the education history and so on?

Giedrius Daubaris (26:20)
Absolutely. So my career started in finance, in investment banking, spent a few years there before jumping into private equity. So I've been always indoctrinated with sort of the dislike for inefficiency. And I kind of have seen it in many cases, working with multiple companies, both through advisory work, as well as actively investing into companies and trying to optimize their operations. But it's really

especially related to accounts receivable and these finance workflows, came ⁓ to being during my most recent experience. was a chief of staff and later head of finance and operations at Flow, a series A startup, which has recently been acquired by Apex Group, where I first started noticing and grappling on a more operational level with those inefficiencies. And that sparked the ideas for me and my co-founder that this is

a right time to jump into this and rethink how it could be possibly done. It also happened that my co-founder, who we both went to business school ⁓ together and formed a great working relationship, he brings an amazing expertise in the technical field from working in research and development and most recently working at Boston Consulting Group, helping much larger companies go through a digital transformation. We were both at a similar time and a similar realization to be like, okay, we could build something.

really exciting here, which sparked us to ⁓ take a plunge into entrepreneurial waters and a few months later, here we are.

Ali | Startup Explore (27:54)
That's awesome. I hear your story and let me maybe dive in. So once you came up with this idea that you wanted to build, I'm curious to hear if you did some sort of like surveys from prospective customers and so on, just to kind of ⁓ decide a hundred percent that this is something worth building or is it purely coming like from your experience and you decided that you guys just started working on it.

Giedrius Daubaris (28:12)
Mm-hmm.

This is a fantastic question. And I think when we first started, we thought, okay, we started with the same idea of, you know, acting proactively and focusing on the contract information, but we were really focused on extracting the customer, the contract information rather than doing work with it. The hypothesis was that companies right now, if you talk to many of them, contracts live all over the place. Very often you'll ask them to find something and it's a process of digging through.

salespeople's inboxes and so on to find the relevant information and to uncover any potential risks. But as we started commercializing that initial product focused only on contract management, we realized it's relatively nice to have. And through many, many conversations, we started hearing that actually where the problem starts is when it hits the desk of the finance and operations teams. And that gave us an idea to explore further. And so the more conversations we were having, the more we built the

conviction that the old way of doing things is not sustainable in this much more ⁓ nimble, much more nuanced world of finance as the pricing complexity increases and so on. So to your question, it was a discovery process in some ways, but I think we now landed in an exciting space where we're seeing not only interest, but also the willingness to pay in some ways.

Ali | Startup Explore (29:44)
Yeah,

that's exciting. Now thinking about the total addressable market that you guys are going after, how big you think it is or how quickly it's growing?

Giedrius Daubaris (29:55)
Yeah, it's a great question and you can always debate with folks about how to go about quantifying it, right? But in some ways, 80 to 90 % of businesses, even in the United States, operate on some sort of contractual revenue basis, right? So if we're taking that as a base and how many companies we could potentially help out by optimizing this process, this number is in hundreds of billions of dollars and that's

both considering what people spend already on accounts receivable automation software today where we could win some market share, but also how much they're spending on, let's say, outsourced services that help them. In some cases, actually, we speak to companies where they say, we don't have any problems with accounts receivable, only to find out that the reason for that is because they're outsourcing it to four people who spend.

every hour of their day today. And I think that's a big opportunity to ⁓ essentially tap into that market for optimization and leveraging those people to perform even higher value added tasks while we automate the sort of more mundane perhaps in the time consuming.

Ali | Startup Explore (31:11)
Yeah, that's an interesting perspective. basically, with Exante, companies can somewhat maybe replace some of the outsourcing capabilities that they have been paying for.

Giedrius Daubaris (31:21)
Right.

And we prefer to think about it as not necessarily replacing, but leveraging them for higher value added work. You don't want to be paying for someone to essentially key in things from one to another. You want them to actually use that data and perform tasks that get cash into the bank account and so on. think ⁓ we enable both lean finance teams to do that as well as larger customers that might realize even more efficiencies.

Ali | Startup Explore (31:49)
That's a good point. Now switching gears to competition. And I know that you might've touched on some of these points already, but let me ask you this. So who's your kind of closest that competitors and more importantly, what makes you to stand out and different from them?

Giedrius Daubaris (32:06)
Yeah, that's a great question. think the way we think about it is, ⁓ to our surprise, potentially, one of the biggest competitors is ⁓ the spreadsheet. Something that the finance teams rely on on a day-to-day basis to try and manage their operations. But if we were to jump into software solutions, I think a lot of companies you'll find that are trying to invoice ⁓ and manage their billing

Ali | Startup Explore (32:18)
Ha

Giedrius Daubaris (32:35)
through their ERPs, whether it's NetSuite billing modules, whether it's QuickBooks, et cetera. But really, that software has been built as a system of record, as we discussed, and it's not necessarily as intuitive to perform work on a day-to-day basis. That's why you saw sort of the Billing 2.0 solutions come out ⁓ in terms of automation and recurring billing, which is, know, Maxio, ChargeB, Recurly, these kinds of companies that

really unlocked a lot of wins for companies that maybe have slightly simpler billing needs and so on. And I think as you take a further step into what's happening now in this space, there's a lot of activity. It's a highly competitive market because a lot of the players are recognizing just the size of the opportunity that there is in automating accounts receivable. But it's met with the demand.

that comes from those companies actively exploring potential solutions. you know, you probably, if you look at the market, you'll see multiple examples of AI powered accounts receivable software coming out there. And I think if I look at the market, there's companies approaching it in very different ways. And we're all learning in terms of what's going to stick in terms of a solution that's adopted by the customers.

Some companies go the route of voice agents and explore that, sort of doing collections by calling the customers and automating those calls to collect the payments. Some other companies are going towards the route of automating the ingestion into the your customer's accounts payable portal, because that's often a big bottleneck. Really how we think about our differentiation on how we're positioning ourselves. We don't want to be yet another

point solution that's ⁓ sort of focused on addressing a specific issue. ⁓ We want to build the end-to-end unified revenue hub for companies to have that full visibility from the contract landing into your bank account or sort of the contract landing in your closed one folder to cash in your bank account. And I think in terms of whether that could be replicated by existing players, we're learning more and more that it's highly difficult to just

you know, superimpose AI on top of existing systems and workflows. And I think that presents us with an opportunity being an early stage company to build with AI at the ⁓ core of our sort of offering, which allows us to move much faster in this particular space of rolling out more advanced functionality over time.

Ali | Startup Explore (35:16)
Got it. So with that positioning of Exante for the future, where do see the company, let's say in three to five years?

Giedrius Daubaris (35:23)
Yeah, that's a great question. love looking ahead. And I think working on this, as we touched on, there's a lot of trust that needs to be built in a function like Finance to kind of see these kinds of solutions to proliferate. provided that you can build that trust, ⁓ it can serve as the foundation in those early use cases, such as accounts receivable automation, to then start going into more and more advanced

Ali | Startup Explore (35:34)
Mm-hmm.

Giedrius Daubaris (35:52)
use cases within the office of the CFO, you know, whether it's a treasury management, whether it's accounts payable and touching cash flows for all sorts of other banking operations. The way we see the vision for the company is really expanding into a unified, ⁓ agenda automation platform for the office of the CFO.

And, ⁓ it's early days, so we're focusing on getting one thing right and getting it right consistently.

before we then start building and expanding around that core functionality.

Ali | Startup Explore (36:24)
That makes sense. Very exciting stuff. And as the company grows, you would need to hire more and more people. I'm curious what kind of qualities you look for in candidates when you hire them.

Giedrius Daubaris (36:37)
Yeah, that's a great question. It's never easy. Like one of the things we're learning, you know, hiring is ⁓ tough, but I'm happy to say that we were able to build just a fantastic team working with us. And I think if I had to identify one ⁓ quality that makes them so amazing, it's probably the initiative. And, you know, in the early stages of building a company, there's so much ambiguity and uncertainty that, you know,

You could wait and be asked to do a certain task, etc. But the people that will thrive best in this environment are the ones who are saying, hey, I see something I don't like, or I see the potential problem and let me go figure it out to either accelerate sales, either accelerate the ⁓ product build, etc. So that ⁓ initiative has been something that we have been very happy in terms of our

team and continue to keep an eye out. Is that going to be the person who will push us as the founders as opposed to the other way around?

Ali | Startup Explore (37:42)
Yeah, that's nice. Having that, I guess, get things done mentality and being proactive. That's very important, especially as you're building and scaling the company. Yeah. All right. So let me flip the question now, I guess, for future potential candidates out there, why should they join Exante? What would you tell them?

Giedrius Daubaris (37:51)
Absolutely.

Yeah, I think, look, we're working at the bleeding edge of applied AI in a space that's, ⁓ highly tricky, but at the same time, an extremely large market. So it's an opportunity to join a company in a highly impactful position, building a potentially very large solution if we get things right. Right. And I think that provides the learning curve that is difficult to find, ⁓ in many other environments.

And so think for the right kind of profile for a person who's looking for that growth, for that high slope, this is the right opportunity, both in terms of potential upside as well as the learning opportunities that it brings.

Ali | Startup Explore (38:44)
Yeah, makes sense. Now let me switch gears back to the funding and let me ask you this. So can you provide some color how the fundraising worked out for you that that journey? And what I'm trying to get as is maybe some of the founders of other companies might use your experience in your journey to help them raise funds for the first time.

Giedrius Daubaris (39:07)
No, it's a fantastic question and I'm sure all the founders have gone through their own journey of fundraising. And I think for us, was essentially a relatively, I wouldn't say long, I would say a period of really looking into what we want to build because we knew that as soon as we raised the capital, it will kind of make the clock start ticking, right? So we, Sebastian and I, my co-founder,

We spent a good six months just getting on top of what we want to build and getting conviction ourselves that we're excited about being in this for 10 years or more if required. ⁓ So once we got that conviction, we actually followed a relatively straightforward process of raising capital. We reached out, I think, ⁓ to around 100 investors, both here in the Bay Area as well as in New York and Boston, where we have some business school connections, et cetera.

And ⁓ it was an intense couple of weeks of sort of back to back meetings, et cetera. And there was naturally a lot of no's as well. think any founder should not get disheartened by this process. Having been on the other side of being an investor in the private equity context, I know that everyone says more no's, drastically no's than yeses. the highlight of this is that you only need one. So when we met the

Urban Innovation Fund team, they were fantastic in terms of engaging with us very thoughtfully, but also moving super fast. So I think within four days or so we had five meetings by the end of which we ended up signing the term sheet.

Ali | Startup Explore (40:48)
That's exciting. Now, when you say reaching out to hundreds of investors, was that pretty much like cold outreach using like emails and phones or most of it was through kind of networks and introductions.

Giedrius Daubaris (41:00)
I think it's a, I think it's a mix of both, right? And I think before you even start reaching out, you kind of want to figure out the list of investors that make sense. Do they, do they provide the capital at your stage? Have they been funding ⁓ companies over the last couple of years? Are they someone that's, know, going to add value as an investor? Once you have that, naturally we looked for warm intros or reaching out through our

network and having the conversations. But also there were plenty of situations where we had to do the cold outreach to get the conversations. And I think what's really important there is you cannot just expect that people will pick up your call. You have to make a case for why do you think it's relevant for them and how this could be an exciting opportunity. And I think we managed to do pretty well there in scheduling a bunch of meetings and meeting a lot of people.

Ali | Startup Explore (41:56)
Yeah, congrats again

I know we've talked a lot about work. Let me ask you a question outside of work. What kind of things you like to do? Do you have some hobbies?

Giedrius Daubaris (42:05)
Yeah, that's a great question. I think, you know, sometimes I say that if I ever retire, there's not going to be a single day that I'm on board. think hobbies is something I have definitely plenty of. So, and I do enjoy learning. do enjoy new experiences. I think that leads me to, you know, start playing golf, even if I'm totally terrible at it. Play some squash.

et cetera, get them to board games and even recently, know, flight simulators, et cetera. But I think one thing I would point out is Sebastian and I are currently training for the San Francisco Marathon. I think it's going to be the first marathon for both of us, but it provides us a good backdrop to, you know, intense work days and combining that with actually trying to stay fit and take care of ourselves and our team by getting out there and putting some miles.

Ali | Startup Explore (43:00)
That's awesome. Is that going to be kind of a full marathon?

Giedrius Daubaris (43:04)
It's going to be a full marathon provided that we can complete it. know, this is San Francisco Hills might have other ideas, but we'll see.

Ali | Startup Explore (43:07)
Okay.

That's awesome. All right, so my last question, Giedrius, is that I know we've covered a lot around the product, company, future vision. Is there anything else that we didn't touch on that you want to share with the audience?

Giedrius Daubaris (43:26)
No, think, ⁓ like coming back to this idea of the series B reckoning, right. ⁓ I think what we provide in building this, this tool is an ability for companies to act proactively about issues that we know come around us. ⁓ companies are navigating rapid growth, ⁓ and so on. typically with a lot of other software, ⁓ or ERPs and so on, it, there is,

⁓ a big block in terms of how long it takes to implement those ⁓ solutions and get them to work. think going into this and as we're looking at AI powered solutions, both in the finance world and outside, this is an exciting opportunity to really experiment with solutions that can provide the value much faster. And so if anyone's on the fence of whether they should spend any time on this at all, I would say

Get in touch with us, let's have a conversation, and let us show you how you can generate ⁓ value from the first uploaded contract.

Ali | Startup Explore (44:33)
That's great to hear. Kejers, thank you so much for coming to the show. I'm really excited to have you here and hopefully we will meet again sometime soon and you will have even bigger successes to share.

Giedrius Daubaris (44:44)
Absolutely, Ali. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a fantastic conversation.