InScope nabs $14.5M to solve the pain of financial reporting

Even without any accounting training, anyone who’s ever opened a 10-K or 10-Q can see how complicated and time-consuming financial statement preparation really is.

Legacy platforms such as Workiva and Donnelley Financial Solutions are built to make reporting more manageable. However, veteran accountants Mary Antony (pictured right) and Kelsey Gootnick (pictured centre) say they still felt drained by the amount of manual work these systems often leave behind (co-founder and CTO Jared Tibshraeny is pictured left).

Antony and Gootnick first met seven years ago at Flexport, where Gootnick worked as controller and Antony served as assistant controller. They kept in touch even after Antony moved on to Miro, and Gootnick went to Hopin and later Thrive Global.

Across every role and every company, the same friction points kept showing up for both.

“The way financial statements come together, it’s just patched together in a lot of spreadsheets, moved into a bunch of Word documents, emailed back and forth between people,” Antony said.

That shared frustration ultimately pushed them to build something new. In 2023, the pair launched InScope, an AI-powered financial reporting platform designed to help companies and accounting firms automate large parts of the financial statement preparation workflow. The startup has now raised $14.5 million in Series A funding led by Norwest, with participation from Storm Ventures and existing investors Better Tomorrow Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

InScope isn’t yet fully generating core outputs like income statements and balance sheets end-to-end, but it does handle a major share of the repetitive and error-prone tasks that eat up time. The platform automates everything from math checks to formatting consistency. Even small fixes — like ensuring dollar signs, commas, and number formatting are uniform and correctly placed — can save accountants as much as 20% of their time, according to Antony, who is InScope’s CEO.

Momentum has followed. Over the past 12 months, InScope says it has grown its customer base fivefold, drawing in notable accounting firms including CohnReznick, which is currently ranked among the top 15 nationally.

Still, broad adoption of fully automated financial statement preparation may take time. Accountants, a profession Antony describes as cautious and risk-averse, may not be ready to hand over complete control to AI anytime soon. Even so, she says full automation remains InScope’s long-term destination.

Norwest partner Sean Jacobsohn said he decided to back InScope after hearing clients repeatedly say the product delivers meaningful time savings. He believes InScope is differentiated because the company is being built by founders who truly understand the work from the inside.

“It’s a very complex space, and you need to be able to have been in the shoes of the buyer before,” he said.

Antony also acknowledges that it’s not common for accountants to start venture-backed companies. But she and Gootnick say years spent inside fast-moving, high-growth startups helped them build the instincts needed to leap — and to take on a category they believe is overdue for reinvention.