Keeping it Casual! London-based platform raises $20 million to replace clunky and outdated traditional spreadsheets

Organisations have for far too long relied on spreadsheets that few people within the business truly understood how to use. With no way to connect to live data sources, they put a lot of time and resources into manual workflows and workarounds to overcome the shortcomings of traditional spreadsheets. Also, there are fewer ways available to collaborate and present spreadsheets to stakeholders in real-time, often resorting to sharing static images of spreadsheets that couldn’t be amended. 

Enter London-based collaborative platform for financial modelling Causal which is attempting to change the tide. The platform has now raised a $20 million funding after it added 30% more customers month-on-month last year.

The round was led by Coatue and Accel and saw the participation of high-profile angel investors, including Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, Notion COO Akshay Kothari and Brex CRO Sam Blond. Existing investors include AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant and Adobe CPO Scott Belsky.

The fresh capital will enable the company to hire rapidly, with plans to grow from 12 employees to 50 globally by the end of 2022. It had earlier raised a $4.2 million funding in March.

Founded in 2019 by Taimur Abdaal and Lukas Köbis, Casual aims to democratise business planning and make it accessible to every team in a company beyond just the finance team. The platform empowers anyone in a company to build, share and understand financial models — the numbers that drive their business decisions. Causal lets users create cloud-based financial models, connect them directly to live data wherever it's stored, and share them through interactive dashboards with beautiful visuals.

According to the company, Causal’s live data integrations with hundreds of systems (accounting/ERP, CRM, data warehouses, and more) typically save finance teams one to two days of work per month.

Taimur Abdaal co-founder, Causal said: “Despite being used every day across the globe, spreadsheets haven't fundamentally evolved over the past 40 years. Spreadsheet models are hard to build and maintain, disconnected from the rest of a company’s tech stack, and actively hinder collaboration across teams. We’re building a next-generation tool to solve these problems.”

David Cahn, partner, Coatue, added: “Companies face big problems when it comes to relying on spreadsheets siloed in the finance team. We think Casual has a novel product that’s going to make number-crunching fast, collaborative, and accessible.”