Most founders don’t fear competition. They fear the spreadsheet.
It’s 11:47 p.m. You’re not debugging code or answering customers. You’re staring at cash flow, wondering if the numbers are lying to you. Somewhere between “I think we’re fine” and “we might be dead in six months,” finance becomes a quiet, persistent anxiety. That’s the problem Alexander Wulff decided to go after.
Alexander is the CEO and co-founder of ScaleUp Finance, and the mind behind NUM, an AI CFO built for startups and small businesses. Before fintech, he spent more than a decade building and exiting a deep-tech company. He lived the pain. Founder by day, accidental CFO by night. That experience shaped a simple insight, finance is the most broken function in early-stage companies, and no one is really fixing it.
Finance is universal pain, not a niche problem
Talk to ten founders and you’ll hear ten versions of the same story. Monster spreadsheets. Fragile accounting setups. Sunday night anxiety before board meetings. Even founders with finance backgrounds feel behind, and most founders don’t have one.
The root issue isn’t intelligence or effort. It’s structure. Small companies rarely have a real finance team. They rely on outsourced bookkeeping, occasional advice, and hope. Strategic financial thinking, the kind that helps you decide when to hire, how fast to grow, or when to say no, is usually missing.
That gap is exactly where ScaleUp Finance started.
A contrarian bet, software plus humans
Instead of building pure SaaS from day one, Alexander and his team did something unfashionable. They combined software with real CFOs. Inspired by Palantir’s forward-deployed model, they embedded finance experts directly with customers while building the product alongside them.
The logic was simple. Finance tools cannot be “mostly right.” They must be right. And the only way to get there was tight feedback loops between engineers and people who actually do the work.
This approach paid off early. Customers didn’t just like the product, they shared it. Investors and board members began seeing financial reports stamped “powered by ScaleUp Finance” and asking where it came from. Distribution emerged naturally, because quality travels.
When AI finally became useful for finance
For years, AI felt promising but unreliable for financial work. Large language models are great with words, less great with numbers. That changed when the team began building agentic systems, not chatbots.
Instead of one model guessing answers, NUM breaks every task into smaller steps. Specialized agents retrieve data, verify it, analyze it, and cross-check results. Accuracy isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s the product.
This shift turned ScaleUp Finance’s original SaaS vision into something bigger. NUM wasn’t just a tool. It behaved like a CFO. Always available. Never tired. Comfortable answering the “dumb” questions founders are often afraid to ask.
Why this matters more than automation
The real impact isn’t saving time or money, though it does both. It’s confidence. Founders make better decisions when they actually understand what’s happening in their business. They stop avoiding finance and start using it.
Alexander points out something subtle. Many CEOs don’t ask their head of finance half the questions they’re thinking, because they don’t want to sound uninformed. An AI CFO removes that friction. No judgment. Just answers.
Over time, that changes behavior. Better questions lead to better decisions. Better decisions compound.
The long game
Alexander isn’t chasing a feature checklist. His north star is simple, what would a great human CFO do here? The roadmap follows from that question. More proactive insights. More automation without prompting. Fewer dashboards, more signal.
The ambition is global, because the problem is global. Debit and credit are the same language everywhere. Financial anxiety is too.
When asked about legacy, Alexander doesn’t talk about valuation or scale. He talks about sleep.
If founders can sleep better at night, because they trust their numbers and understand their options, the product has done its job.
And maybe, just maybe, the spreadsheet stops being the villain of the startup story.
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Chapters:
00:01 Introduction and Alexander Wulff’s background
02:05 From deep tech founder to fintech operator
04:12 Living the CFO problem as a founder
06:10 Early product market fit and rapid inbound demand
08:02 Viral distribution through financial reporting
10:01 Blending CFO services with software
12:30 Why finance tools must be 100% accurate
14:45 The shift from SaaS to agentic AI
17:20 Building NUM, an AI CFO
20:10 Orchestrating agents for financial accuracy
23:05 Ideal customer profile and SME focus
26:00 Finance complexity as companies scale
29:15 Democratizing CFO access with AI
32:10 Founder behavior and finance confidence
35:05 Lessons from scaling too fast
37:30 Long-term vision for AI in finance
Transcript
Brian Bell (00:01:09): Hey everyone, welcome back to the Ignite Podcast. Today, we are thrilled to have Alexander Wolff on the mic. He is the CEO and co-founder of ScaleUp Finance, a fintech startup on a mission to build an AI CFO for growth companies. Very interesting. He brings years of entrepreneurial experience, finance and accounting depth and a global view on scaling fintech infrastructure. We’ll dig into how he got here, what he’s building now, where he’s headed next. Thanks for coming on, Alexander. Yeah, it’s a pleasure to be on. Well, I’d love to get your origin story. What’s your background?
Alexander Wulff (00:01:37): My background, I typically say I’ve been a founder my whole, at least adult career. I started my first VC-backed company in 2010. I almost can’t comprehend that it’s so many years ago, but I started something completely different to what I’m doing today because I actually started a deep tech company where we developed a new building material in concrete, ran that company for 11 years, exited five years ago, and then decided that I wanted to solve one of the biggest problems that I had been having myself running my previous company. And that was, guess it, financial management.
Brian Bell (00:02:12): That’s amazing. So what were some of the key moments or frustrations that you saw that must be a better way? I mean, you exit a company, there’s sort of like a vacation period. When did you know you’re going to work on this?
Alexander Wulff (00:02:23): I actually had zero vacation period because it was slightly before I exited. I already teamed up with a new group of still entrepreneurs here in Copenhagen. And we had been talking about this for quite some months. So no vacation, but... But I think that the real moment that led us to start Skill of Finance, not just me, but also the co-founders I have here, is that we had just been living this problem ourselves. I typically say that I was my own de facto CFO and I even studied finance and accounting at Copenhagen Business School. So compared to a lot of other founders and small business owners, I would say I had a pretty good foundation, but most founders, they are techies or product people or somebody with some industry or domain expertise, right? That just get this idea to build a product, whatever it is. I actually had some kind of foundation, but I also just typically say that studying finance and accounting in a business school definitely doesn’t make you a finance pro. And then, you know, when you are in the startup ecosystem for so many years, you meet hundreds of other founders at different events and stuff like that. And it just felt like every time I went to these events, you know, it just so often came up that this financial management, it’s just, you know, it’s this burning problem and It’s my Sunday anxiety. And everybody talked about this monster of a spreadsheet that they built up or this really error prone finance tech stack or whatever it might be. And it was just really, it was almost pattern recognition. You know, I felt it myself, but I don’t think I ever met a founder who didn’t call finance a problem or at least a very serious pain point.
Brian Bell (00:04:00): Yeah. So what were some of the biggest obstacles? Because obviously this was quite different from your last company as you started to build this out.
Alexander Wulff (00:04:06): Yeah, well, starting Scalar Finance was quite different to what I did before and also what is probably the typical trajectory when you start a company because I think we hit product market fit within three or four months of starting out Scalar Finance. And then the big challenge that I’d never tried before that was really scaling. I think we hit $1 million in ARR less than 12 months after starting and we We almost hit 100 employees two years after starting. And that pace and all the things changing all the time, that really took me a bit by surprise, I’d say.
Brian Bell (00:04:44): How did you know you had product market fit?
Alexander Wulff (00:04:46): The sheer amount of customers that we closed. I remember it was a very... kind of very specific moment in time. I think we launched Scala Finance 1st of May and I got back from summer vacation. It was in 21. And suddenly when I came back, my phone just couldn’t stop ringing. And it was from potential customers. But even more than that, it was from a lot of these. It was actually VCs and like board members in some of our customers. And they all told me the same story. They were like, Alex, I’m sitting here with like a monthly financial report from one of my portfolios. It has a little banner in the button saying, powered by Scala Finance, this is the best monthly report I’ve ever received from any of my portfolios. Need to learn a bit more about you and like, what do you do? Because then I’m going to make you five entries right away. And when that happened, you know, it was just like, yeah, a lot of inbound coming our way and then a challenge to, you know, make sure that we could scale to the needs.
Brian Bell (00:05:43): Yeah. So it sounds like you just had just a ton of inbound interest, right? So people were talking and they were noticing and you had a little bit of a viral logo loop in there kind of like from, you know, taking a lesson from the Hotmail days, right? You know, sent with Hotmail or whatever. Yeah.
Alexander Wulff (00:05:58): We were actually inspired by Hotmail because we really felt like we had one of our key kind of deliveries was this like monthly report. And we created this export to PDF function. And we really wanted to look like something that almost was, you know, Fortune 500 worthy. And so we did. And that’s pretty uncommon for a startup. I’ve talked to many VCs and board members that, you know, have told me about, let’s just call it the quality or the state of whatever reporting they are getting. So in doing that, it just felt quite natural to add a little logo, a little banner saying, you know, powered by Scalar Finance. And then, yeah, it was the hotmail moment, maybe.
Brian Bell (00:06:35): Yeah. And what was, if you recall back in those days, like you would probably get this inbound interest, you do a demo. What was your like demo to close ratio? Just for fans listening out there.
Alexander Wulff (00:06:44): Yeah, no, and that was the crazy part. I think it was 60%.
Brian Bell (00:06:47): Six zero. So like more than half of the folks who saw it, like, yep, I want to buy this. Like, how much is it? And then maybe we could back up a little bit and just talk about what scale up finance is, what you’re solving today, how it works in practice, all that stuff.
Alexander Wulff (00:06:59): We are a bit of an, I typically say we are a little bit unorthodox. And we have been quite contrarian since the day we started because we are both a tech company and a service company. We were extremely inspired by Palantir back in the days. And, you know, today I know that Palantir is being put on a pedestal for very good and natural reasons. But five years ago, when we started and we were doing a lot of research and trying to build out our strategy plans and our product roadmap, and we were, of course, looking a lot into what had other people built before us and how had they kind of tracked and how had they done. We had seen some early versions of what we kind of had in mind and what we were intending on building. And we did a lot of research and found out that it had been very difficult for them to actually gain customers. Yeah, and like long story short, we then stumbled across an article written by one of the founders of Palantir who talked about this forward deployed engineers model. And we just thought it made so much sense to also do that in finance. Because the big challenge, again, just to make a very long story short, was that fintech and financial tools and financial solutions, they just need to work. They cannot work 70% or 80%. They just need to work because it’s one of the most sensitive use cases almost to your entire company operations. And that might take more than one year or two years or even three years to build something that just works. So we actually started, you could like a CFO service business, tech-enabled CFO service. And we still operate that here in Denmark. And we also have an office in London and operate that in the UK. And so it’s kind of two businesses in one business, because then we have our entire tech and engineering team that have extremely tight feedback loops with CFO. our real CFOs that are working and employed by our company. So that was, of course, also one of the reasons that we were able to really get air under our wings when we started, because we were able to lead with real CFOs that could deliver any functionality or any service that we couldn’t really satisfy with.
Brian Bell (00:09:10): Yeah, that seems to be a trend right now. We’re backing lots of tech enabled services where AI is kind of starting to blur the lines between like SaaS and agency, right? So between those two extremes, like 100% human labor agency and 100% AI, you know, driven CFO work, where do you guys fall on that spectrum? And how do you think about that?
Alexander Wulff (00:09:29): Yeah, today we actually operate the company’s operational speaking a little bit independent. So we have given a lot more autonomy to our CFO service units. We decided when we started building Noom, which is the world’s first ARCFO, we decided we want to deploy our CFO service units a bit more upmarket to like really forward deploy them where Noom might go in the future. Because right now with Noom, our ARCFO, we’re really trying to to attack and bring it out to the downstream segment of the market.
Brian Bell (00:10:03): Yeah, that makes sense. So ScaleUp Finance is the company and Noom is the product. Maybe you could talk about the genesis of that and why different names?
Alexander Wulff (00:10:11): Yeah, so if we go back a little bit in time, I remember it also quite vividly. I think it was around last May or June or something like that, that we made the decision to build Noom like a true agentic system. For three years before that, we had been building a SaaS solution. And our intention was to really incubate that SaaS tool with our CFO service units. So they were actually the first users and the first customers, both our CFOs, but also our external customers. And then after three years, we finally hit what had been our mission from day number one to incubate it to the point where we felt like now it actually works in a self-serve version. Now we can launch it as a self-serve product. But now I’ve talked to many other AI founders and it seems like there’s different kind of where it just feels like, okay, this is the infliction point where now, You can just see the models have become so strong that the world is changing. That moment happened for us last May or June, I think it was. And it was after Claw 3.5 Sonnet came out. Before that, we had been testing ChatGPT and some of the other models, but it wasn’t really useful or like we couldn’t really make it work. I actually think we had a group in our engineering team that had been just trying to build different POCs. In the early days, our intention was just to apply AI in our existing SaaS platform. Then we had some different ideas. Hey, let’s make a feature here that is powered by AI or something like that. But after 3.5 Sonnet came out, in one month, we went from something with just one feature for the SaaS product we had been building that hadn’t worked for eight months. Suddenly in one month, we built four features and it was incredibly powerful. So it was my CPO who came to me and he told me, Alex, I know we have been doing this for eight months. It hasn’t been working. Now we’ve just built this and we’ve built this and this and this. And my first instinctive reaction was just like, that’s great, man. Let’s do some marketing, release it, put it into the platform. And I was like, no, no, no. What I’m looking at right now, it changes dramatically. my entire thinking about everything. I think we need to take a one week leadership offsite to really discuss the ramifications of what we are seeing right here and right now, because I think this is the moment where AI is now becoming useful for finance. When you look at AI adoption, I think it’s quite clear to see that the adoption has taken off mostly within text-based use cases in the first period. And they are also ChatGPT and Claude called large language models for a reason. That does not mean that you cannot use AI for finance. But if you take a large amount of data or numbers and throw it into ChatGPT and Claude, they will hallucinate. So the way you use AI for finance is about orchestrating agents, give them access to the right tools. And in that way, you can ensure that you can actually hit 100% accuracy and not have like hallucinations that you will have with these others. So anyway, that was a long explanation for us actually having built SaaS, but Actually, almost kind of doing a technological pivot halfway through because we just thought that the future within strategic financial management, which was the vision that we were born with, that suddenly that was not a SaaS product. It was actually a pure play agentic system. And the more we build it out, the more we were like, holy shit, man. You know, this is so much beyond like this is actually an AI CFO. And at that time, you know, our previous platform, the name of that was Scalar Finance. That was the name of both our company, of our CFO services and our tech product. But Scalar Finance screams a lot startup or scale up. And when we’re looking at new, like, but this is a product for basically any small company, any small SME out there worldwide. So we decided to build a completely new brand for the product than what we had before.
Brian Bell (00:14:10): That’s an amazing story. So basically, there’s this shift in the market with 3.5 Sonnet coming out. It’s actually useful for finance. It can get to 100% accuracy if you orchestrate enough agents. What does that iteration process look like with agentic workflows? Like how many times do the agents need to iterate? How many agents are there in the stack talking to each other and checking each other and doing the work and checking the work and turning it in? Yeah, maybe you could describe a little bit of the technical architecture for the 100 level listeners out there.
Alexander Wulff (00:14:39): I’ll do it a bit high level, but I can tell you we have probably had we’ve had thousands of iterations. And the key to actually building out Noom is the fact that we both have the domain expertise and we have our engineering team, right? Because in all these thousand different iterations we’ve had, if we did not have finance experts as part of those iterations, we would not have known how to build it because we wouldn’t have had any chance to verify or test or all of these kinds of different things. But Noom right now, the way that it works is that any task, any query, whatever that it’s doing, it’s breaking it up into as many subtasks as possible and handing that out to specialized agents that have access to different kinds of tools. So we have a swarm of planning agents that all take whatever query task and they are collaborating on creating exactly the right plan for this task. And then that plan is being, first of all, fed on to different kinds of data retrieval agents. We have different verification loops. Then that is handed on to data analysis agents that is then being sent on to other. And then I’m not even describing the full system here. That is how you do it.
Brian Bell (00:15:55): Yeah, so it’s basically, you know, almost a way of thinking about it, I think, is, you know, you have basically, you know, 10, 20 years ago, you have a room full of people, right, at desks doing all these discrete tasks in finance and accounting. And now you have a cloud full of agents doing all these discrete accounting and finance tasks for you, right? Verifying, checking, updating, checking the ledger, reconciling, doing all the little finance operations. And then... How turnkey is it? If I’m a startup, who’s your ICP? Is it from two founders all the way up to 100 million in revenue? What’s your ICP?
Alexander Wulff (00:16:35): Our ICP is all the way down from even one person company, I’d say probably up to around 50. We also do have some businesses a bit north of 50 employees that also use Noom. Startups are a great, let’s call it beachhead ICP or starting ICP because they are so, you know, generally early adopters of new technology. They’re not afraid of using AI. So they are really great. But of course, it’s a tiny part of the entire SME space. So Noom is, you know, it’s all SMEs out there. But startups, we have definitely seen, and we’re also really doing a lot of marketing that is targeted towards startups because they are very fast to adopt.
Brian Bell (00:17:21): Yeah, it’s really interesting. Anywhere from like a company just got revenue all the way up to 50 employees. What happens at 50 employees when you go from 50 to 75 or 100? Do the finance capabilities and needs get really complex and you need to have an in-house CFO or in-house head of finance?
Alexander Wulff (00:17:36): There’s a few things that changes. First of all, I think it’s interesting just to describe a little bit like how the finance function function, because in a very small company, you don’t think about it as a function, how it changes. But what we have seen over the last five years is typically that a startup or just a small company, when they are below 50 employees, they typically don’t even have one full-time internal finance hire. They are using some kind of outsourced financial services, maybe an accountancy that is doing their bookkeeping, running their payroll, that’s it. And then everything else is left on the desk of the CEO, the founder, the owner, whatever. Sometimes they do hire some kind of admin finance person around 30 employees or 40. But generally speaking, many companies operate without even a single finance hire up until 50 employees. From 50 to 100, it changes a little bit because then 100% you will start to hire one, maybe even two, the closer you get to 100. But This is the reason that financial management, finance operations is so relatively broken in small companies compared to large organizations, because in large organizations, you have many different finance competencies. There’s different positions in a large organization. You have bookkeepers, you have controllers, head of finance, head of FP&A, head of tax, then you have the CFO. It’s like an Just like with many other professions, there are different skill sets within finance. So that is even the challenge for these small companies that if they do want to hire the first person in the finance team, they have to choose one skill set. It is really a big challenge.
Brian Bell (00:19:14): Yeah. So how do you see the future of finance, operations, scaling and companies and just generally other departments? Do you see the companies of the future when these agentic departments are fully deployed? Do you see companies basically just having a head of each area and like underneath the head of each area is just a swarm of agents like Noom provides or... Or will you eventually scale up where you have, instead of scaling up finance to have a whole department for accounts payable and accounts receivable, maybe you have just the accounts receivable person with agents underneath? Or is it just a CFO in the future talking to a bunch of agents, department head agents?
Alexander Wulff (00:19:53): I definitely think that it will lead to a lot of productivity increases. But for the SME space, it will... I think the first thing it will do for them is really give them access to competencies and tools that they have never had access to before. I think it will probably transform in terms of joblessness and stuff like that. That will probably hit the enterprise segment much more because they have such large finance teams. But the big problem for the small companies is that, first of all, They often don’t have enough tasks to really justify full-time hire. They don’t even have enough revenue to justify hiring somebody. So they’re so reliant on outsourced services, but not even that they are choosing too much. But when you have AI, when you have agents, I think what I’ve seen over the last many years is that finance is so broken in a lot of these SMEs. So it’s not because I think it will mean that a lot of people will be jobless. I just think it will increase the quality and the insights for a lot of these small companies.
Brian Bell (00:20:59): So for the founders out there listening who might be looking for a solution like this, how much does it cost? Does it save them money versus hiring some agency firm? How do they think about that?
Alexander Wulff (00:21:08): Yeah, that’s the beautiful thing about AI, that now you can bring out a CFO competencies to a segment that cannot afford it at a completely different price. We can do this like 10x lower than if you want to go to any kind of finance consultancy. And the nice thing, the beautiful thing is that on a lot of parameters, it’s even better than a person, right? Some of our early beta users, I remember chatting to some of them and like three, six months ago where they told me some things that I hadn’t even been considering, but they told me that, you know, just having access to this 24 seven in the weekends and stuff like that, that was a huge relief because when you are reliant on outsourced services where they have other clients, The time to get an answer, get a job done is not two hours. It’s not even a couple of days. Sometimes it’s weeks before they can help you out. And that is the broken nature of the SME space where this space is so reliant on outsource services because you typically cannot employ people in. internally then then i think what is is also interesting is the whole collaboration between finance teams and the leadership team also when the companies grow a bit in size because we also have a we all they are larger around 50 employees and sometimes a little bit larger exactly it started with the ceo who got in contact with us and then started using and said hey i actually want this edge for my i want my finance team to to use this But then during some of our feedback sessions told us, guys, I’m really, it’s really dawning on me right now that there’s so many questions on a day-to-day basis. I never ask my, you know, head of finance or my CFO about because I feel like an idiot. I feel silly for just asking these questions. So some of these users were starting to paint a picture that we had not even realized ourselves. The finance team and the leadership team is somewhat siloed today and with AI where you don’t need to feel like an idiot or feel silly for asking any questions. That’s also a huge power in itself that I think will really democratize financial knowledge also and education, maybe even to some extent, because you can really hypercharge your own learning and understanding about finance and how everything fits together.
Brian Bell (00:23:27): So what surprised you in executing this plan and what was the plan coming out of that one week retreat of where you guys pivoted the technology and what surprised you in the coming months and years on market adoption, customer behavior, tech performance, distribution, all that stuff? Yeah.
Alexander Wulff (00:23:42): Yeah, so we’re actually bringing Numa out of private beta on Thursday, which is three days from now. So that will be hugely interesting. And we are trying to give this out to as many people as possible. So it will be quite affordable. First of all, it will come with a free trial or like a freemium actually. And then it will come out if you want to go to the paid version at $99 per month.
Brian Bell (00:24:08): Yeah. And just for people listening, that means, you know, it probably came out a couple of weeks ago by time we publish it. So you should definitely go check it out. And where is it available now? And kind of what are your ambitions to scale it around the world?
Alexander Wulff (00:24:20): Yeah. So it’s available on our website, Noom.ai. We have created... N-U-M-E. A lot of people actually don’t know exactly how it’s built, but that’s great.
Brian Bell (00:24:26): Yeah, exactly.
Alexander Wulff (00:24:27): No, but we have spent quite a lot of time building out an amazing onboarding experience. I know that, you know, I’m probably biased because it’s my own product, but we have spent a lot of time making sure that the onboarding is just stellar. And with Noom, you can onboard your own AI CFO in literally between five and seven minutes. So you go in, you press get started. The first thing you do is connect QuickBooks or whatever accounting system you’re using. It takes 30 seconds. Then you connect your bank account. It takes 30 seconds. Then you connect Slack. At least we will add some Teams and some other stuff later. And then Noom will ask you some different targeted questions about your targets, your business model, what products you are selling, what your challenges are. And after that, Noom will actually tailor the entire setup and all the advisory, all the automated workflows to your company specifically. It will know which country you’re in, what accounting rules apply to you. And I’m not joking, it’s like five to seven minutes that this takes. It’s out of the box. And it goes directly into Slack. You will have Noom in a channel where the first range of automated workflows that we build out will just start going in. You don’t need to know anything about finance. You don’t even need to lift your finger. Noom will send you insights and different kinds of reports that are part of a, what would you say? A normal CFOs, work week or work month will just be fed to you.
Brian Bell (00:26:04): Yeah, just available at your fingertips. What about other systems you have to integrate with, like payroll and things like that?
Alexander Wulff (00:26:09): So most tools connect directly to the accounting system. It’s kind of when you, the way I typically describe the market for ERP systems and accounting systems, because there’s a difference. ERP are for enterprise and accounting systems are for SMEs. ERP systems are really these very horizontal monster systems that is not only accounting, it’s also CRM, supply chain management, HR, everything in one system. And the only reason they work for very large organizations is because you can customize them 100% to whichever organization you are if you use 20 consultants in like half a year or one year or something like that.
Brian Bell (00:26:47): Yeah, millions of dollars and a bunch of consultants, yeah.
Alexander Wulff (00:26:50): Yeah. So if you actually study the market for like CRM, accounting, payroll, everything I just mentioned for the SME space, it’s very, very different. It’s almost like you took ERP and exploded a bomb in it and then created a lot of separate verticals, a lot of separate categories. And the reason for that, at least that’s my analysis, is because as a small company, you need to go out in the market, grab a a product down the shelf and then it kind of just needs to work with a very minimal effort. But that just means that you have QuickBooks, a lot of other accounting systems that have almost like this ecosystem of like tools around it that are typically inside an ERP system like payroll, spend management, invoice management, yada, yada. But they all have integrations with and feed the data, for example, from your payroll system back into QuickBooks. We are going to expand with a lot of different integrations for Noom. But we already, with just your QuickBooks and bank integration, can fetch the vast majority, the most important kind of finances. information and data that you have as a company.
Brian Bell (00:27:57): Yeah. So what about looking forward? Like, what are you excited to build over the next year or two? What’s on the roadmap?
Alexander Wulff (00:28:02): Yeah, that’s a tough question because, you know, right now we have a backlog of 100, maybe even a thousand different ideas that we want to apply for Noom. We are potentially keeping our cards a little bit close to us. But if I can answer just in a bit, a little more high level, whenever I think about Noom and whenever we have discussions in our product team, we actually typically say, what would a normal CFO do? Like a real human CFO do, how would they respond? And that’s really the north star for anything we do. I know that in the very immediate future, what we believe is going to be the most impactful for our users is the automated workflows. Sometimes I say that Noom is really to be thought of as two products or like two parts and they are equally important. But what has taken us the longest to build is this first part. It’s the financial brain that we’ve built and it has taken us more than one year to really build it out so it’s accurate. I think it’s not only two months ago that we finally hit 100% in our finance emails and we have like 100 different finance equals. So building that part was enormously demanding and challenging. But this part of the product looks a bit like ChatGPT or Claude. It can answer any finance question about your company, just with the exception that it’s accurate, which Claude and ChatGPT will not be if you ask them about anything related to your finance. But the other part And this is these automated workflows that works out of the box. And finance is, there’s a lot of workflows, monthly recurring tasks. So now we are releasing a version one and we already know what, you know, version two and three and four is going to look like. And it’s basically just going deeper and deeper and deeper and providing more and more value. And I also think what makes Noom quite special, at least from a user perspective, when you think about these automated workflows is that There’s so much value that users don’t need to prompt to get the insights. I’m thinking a lot about that because I think one of the biggest, what you say, bottlenecks in terms of getting value out of AI is how much you need to use your finger on your keyboard and say, you know, and that’s one of the other North Stars we have in our product team. We say we never want a user to prompt Noom and you know that’s of course not something we ever really hope to achieve but we really want to come to as close to that as possible that users at least don’t need to prompt Noom because Noom is so intelligent that it will prompt you and tell you what you need to look at and now it just finalized this task and this task and this task and that’s why I’m so bullish about AI and finance Compared to some other verticals, finance consists of many, many recurring, very well-defined workflows. So there’s absolutely no doubt or question that AI is going to be enormously impactful and transformative for finance.
Brian Bell (00:31:03): Yeah. What about the long-term over the next seven to 10 years? What’s your long-term vision? When you start a company,
Alexander Wulff (00:31:10): hopefully it should be because you want to solve a problem, a pain, and you want to change the lifestyle. And that is really the reason we started ScaleUp. Of course, you also hope to, you know, make a bug or two in the process, right? And with what we are doing with Noom, what makes me quite excited is the size of this opportunity. Over the past one or two years, when I’ve been catching up with other founders or chatting to VCs or my own board or something like that, Sometimes I’ve even heard this phrase so much that I’ve started just to say it myself. The AI CFO is the most obvious product in the world. And when they hear about what we’re doing, then they typically understand why it has not been built just yet. Why it’s not coming until now. Because it has been a much harder challenge to build something like this. than building something where if it’s text-based use cases, like all the air tools we’ve seen for customer support or sales or coding or whatever it is, that’s based on text and LMS are trained on text-based use cases. So that’s why you need to orchestrate agents in a completely different fashion when it comes for finance. But yeah, it does make me excited. about the opportunity because I know how many struggle with finance themselves. And then also this is a very universal problem. We are not building a product where, you know, we never started Scalar Finance just to become, to be a Danish company or, you know, have Danish or Nordic customers. We truly started it because we thought this was a very, very universal pain point and problem that looks pretty similar in all countries around the world. If you want to go down to a micro level, you could even say that the real language we are programming in is debit and credit. The nice thing about that is that language is the same in all countries around the world.
Brian Bell (00:33:02): Let’s wrap up with a quick rapid fire. Looking back, what is one decision you made early on that you would change if you had to start over? That’s a good question.
Alexander Wulff (00:33:10): I think maybe going back to the period where we started and when we ran into, you know, a lot of scaling challenges. I remember I had never heard about growing problems. I think they were, somebody told me. I had a call with two VCs and we were in between rounds. And one of them had worked as Travis Kalanick’s right hand in Uber. And so he offered to be very helpful and supportive as we prepared for a future round. So I took him up on that. And I remember when I sat down there, I was in a very stressful period. And, you know, after having talked for maybe 10 minutes, he stopped me, said, Alex, you know, what you’re talking is totally normal, typical growing problems. When you could like, this happens when you hit 30 employees, this happens when you hit 50 and so on. And at that point, I think I at least spent six months you know, really being stressed. And maybe I should have sought after some, you know, some guidance and some sparring from some people that had actually gone through this, something similar before me.
Brian Bell (00:34:13): What has been a habit or a mindset that has been most critical for you as the founder and CEO?
Alexander Wulff (00:34:17): I think one of the most important traits of a successful founder CEO is really being just relentless, you know, never take no for an answer. When I look back at my last 15, 16 years or 16 years in startup, I have had so many times where I came this close to just accepting that no or just being like, yeah, okay, maybe it was too ambitious. Maybe it can’t work. And I’m happy to say that I have never folded, but I have been so close and I can see that anything else that have happened after that would not have happened if I just like these 15 or 20 times where I came very close to folding, if I had done that. And when I know a lot of other founders and a lot of other startups and I just see the same pattern all across, the successful ones are the ones that just continue, continue, continue despite how many people tell them it will never work or it’s not good and like whatever they tell them. You just need to continue because starting a company and building at a scale, it’s not easy. So if you think it’s going to be easy, then you should never start just to begin with.
Brian Bell (00:35:24): What’s a book, podcast, or resource that has most influenced your thinking about startup finance or scaling tech companies?
Alexander Wulff (00:35:30): I have a few that I’m following right now, different kinds of podcasts. It was really something I started doing maybe two years ago. And before that, I read a lot of books. But then I just saw how I could... almost tenfold my my exposure to extremely insightful intelligent clever people that have been doing something that might be 10 or 20 years ahead of me so so podcasts have changed everything for me i’m listening to so many podcasts every week like some of the ones i’m i’m probably listening to the most right now is i’m listening a lot to the to the all-in podcast it’s also semi-political potentially but but um I find the YC podcast also to be pretty cool. And then here in Europe, in the UK, Harry Steppings, I think is also doing a great show and also extremely insightful to see. But, you know, those are just some of the regulars, right? And then it’s actually just about seeking whatever YouTube feature, if it, you know, knows what you’re interested in. So it’s not just listening to the same shows over again, but those three are probably the ones I consume the most.
Brian Bell (00:36:36): Yeah, I do the YouTube rabbit hole as well. It doesn’t have a job of surfacing, you know, 15 to 20 minute episodes or segments that I really want to consume. I also like the Moonshot podcast, Moonshots with Peter Diamandis and Kuru. That’s a really good one. I feel like if you’re a singulitarian like I am.
Alexander Wulff (00:36:53): I am. And I’ve read a couple of his books, but I’ve not checked out his podcast yet.
Brian Bell (00:36:57): That’s fun. It’s fun. It’s kind of my go-to. It’s like all in and moonshots is kind of my go-to when I get in the car now. What’s a misconception that founders often have about their finances or the CFO function that you’d like to correct?
Alexander Wulff (00:37:06): Founders, they fall in so many different categories, all the way from, you know, really not paying enough attention to Somebody being extremely, you know, just wanting to automate everything. And actually one advice that I have been giving quite a lot of times to maybe mostly pre-seed companies is, okay, you know, right now your finances are pretty simple and you should treat it like that. And if you start doing X, Y, Z, then, you know, it’s just going to be more complicated and it will actually, yeah, confuse you more than the opposite. So finance is really, when you add company and you scale, it really needs to be looked at for whatever stage you are at and, you know, what are the targets? And then simplicity often just wins. So it’s definitely not because I’m arguing against automation and not in any way, but maybe what I’m just trying to make the case for is simplicity because a hundred data points is not going to make you a better founder, a better company. It might be having the right 10 data points or the right 10 metrics that you’re looking at. And it’s just, sometimes I feel like there’s kind of a, people are skewed too much in either category, either doing absolutely nothing and having absolutely no clue how they’re performing, to wanting to get everything in a system with 100 different data points.
Brian Bell (00:38:32): What part of the business are you actively investing in now, people, product, markets, that will define your next chapter? Basically all of them. Everything all at once?
Alexander Wulff (00:38:40): Yeah. Now you could say we are coming out of one and a half years really, really being deep down, just building, building, building. Now we are, of course, opening up our commercial chapter. So that is, relatively speaking, probably where we are investing the most right now. But we are also investing in both our finance, our CFO service, and in our product and engineering team.
Brian Bell (00:39:05): Last question. If things go really well, what do you want your legacy to be? Making people be able to sleep better at night. Love it. Well, Alexander, I really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for coming on.
Alexander Wulff (00:39:14): Yeah, it was a pleasure, Brian.
