The right way to build a full-stack fintech platform: Lessons from Numeric

How Numeric avoided the $200M fintech graveyard by refusing to automate everything.

TL;DR

• ScaleFactor ($103M raised) and Bench ($113M raised) both promised to automate full stack accounting. Both are dead. 
• Numeric ($89M raised) focused only on the month-end close. It's now expanding into a full finance platform with customers like OpenAI and Brex.
• The graveyard lesson: when you say "we do accounting automation," you compete with everyone. When you say "we do close management for enterprise teams," you signal deep expertise and earn the right to expand.

In June 2020, ScaleFactor told its 100 employees that half of them were being laid off immediately [1]. The company had raised $103 million to "automate accounting with AI." A Forbes investigation later revealed that the AI was mostly humans in the Philippines, and the books they produced were filled with errors [2]. 

Four years later, in December 2024, Bench Accounting posted a "Notice of Service Closure" on its website [3]. The company had raised $113 million to become "North America's largest bookkeeping service for small businesses" [4][5]. Over 12,000 customers were left scrambling to find new bookkeepers during tax season. 

Combined: $216 million burned. Two companies dead.

Numeric, on the other hand, raised $89 million, quadrupled revenue in a single year, and landed customers including OpenAI, Brex, Plaid, and Wealthfront [6]. In November 2025, they closed a $51 million Series B to expand from close management into cash management and analytics [7][12].

The difference wasn't better technology. It was fundamentally a different question: 

Which problems are essential to solve, and which are distractions?

The problem with "accounting automation."

ScaleFactor's pitch was seductive. "Automate the entire back office" [8]. Bookkeeping, payroll, invoicing, tax compliance, financial reporting. 

Bench took a similar approach and paired software with human bookkeepers to handle everything from expense tracking to tax prep [9].

Both approaches could apply to hundreds of companies. And that was the problem.

When you position yourself generically as "accounting automation" you're competing in a crowded field, each solving different parts of the problem with varying expertise. QuickBooks. Xero. Local CPA firms. Offshore bookkeepers. Your potential customer has a hundred options to evaluate you against.

When you position yourself generically as "accounting automation," you're competing against every other startup promising to simplify the back office. Pilot. Zeni. Puzzl. Each claims to handle it all. Your differentiation disappears.

Leading with the customer’s biggest pain cuts through competitive distractions, differentiates your solution, and earns the right to expand into other parts of the business.

Identifying the core pain others ignored, Numeric delivered results where ScaleFactor and Bench couldn’t, and is now moving into additional parts of the accounting stack.

Numeric's wedge.

Parker Gilbert wasn't trying to disrupt accounting. He was trying to fix a specific problem he'd lived.

As Head of Finance at Hearth, Gilbert managed the company's first audit. He knew exactly where the pain was: the month-end close [11]. That recurring, high-stakes process where accounting teams reconcile everything, catch errors, produce financials, and prepare for auditors. It's tedious. It's error-prone. And it happens every single month.

"We dared in 2020 that we might build an AI close management solution to alleviate close pain points for enterprise teams," Gilbert wrote in Numeric's Series B announcement [7]. 

Not accounting automation. Close management.

This specificity wasn't a limitation. It was a strategic choice.

Menlo Ventures, which led Numeric's Series A, described the close as "the hourglass neck" of finance [13]. It's the point where all financial data flows through. Every transaction, every subledger, every journal entry eventually lands in the close process. Own the neck of the process, and you can expand in either direction.

The expansion playbook.

Numeric solved the most urgent and strategic pain and earned the right to expand to other parts of the accounting stack.

For the first three years, Numeric focused exclusively on close management: task workflows, reconciliations, flux analysis. They built deep expertise in one workflow before touching anything else.

In 2024, they added analytics and reporting. In 2025, they launched cash management. By 2027, Gilbert believes Numeric will be "the connected platform for finance operations" [7].

Kevin Moore, Controller at Brex, said: “I think ultimately that implementing Numeric is one of the best decisions I've made as controller over my 7 years at Brex" [7].

The key insight: each product Numeric builds makes the others more powerful because they share a unified data layer. Close management feeds analytics. Analytics informs cash management. The platform compounds.

Contrast this with Bench. They tried to be everything from day one: bookkeeping, tax prep, cash flow management, financial insights. They spread resources thin and did nothing exceptionally well. When they shut down, customers couldn't even export their data to standard accounting software [10].

Why specificity signals competence.

When Numeric says "close management platform," a controller immediately knows several things:

• These people understand my workflow. 
• They've thought deeply about reconciliations and flux analysis and audit trails. 
• They're not trying to solve every problem in accounting.

When ScaleFactor said "AI accounting automation," customers thought: this sounds amazing. Then they received error-filled books and realized it was just a bookkeeping firm with good marketing [2].

Specificity isn't a limitation. It's a trust signal. It tells sophisticated buyers: we know exactly what we're solving, and we're going to solve it better than anyone else.

Sandy Yang, Head of Accounting at Plaid, put it simply: "I often highlight Numeric as a company that is taking the right approach, not only to accounting but also to software development" [14].

The “right approach” was picking one workflow, dominating it, and expanding from a place of strength.

The founder lesson.

The lesson isn't "go narrow." Plenty of narrow startups fail. The lesson is this: pick the workflow that gives you a wedge into everything else.

The monthly close is the hourglass neck of finance. Win that, and you can expand into cash management, analytics, and eventually the full finance stack. Start by trying to automate "accounting," and you're competing with everyone while owning nothing.

This pattern shows up across fintech. 

Plaid didn't launch as "financial infrastructure." In 2012, the founders tried building consumer budgeting tools, but kept hitting the same wall: connecting to bank accounts was impossibly hard. So they decided to solve just that one problem and bank accounting linking became the wedge [16]. By 2022, they'd expanded into identity verification , income verification, fraud prevention, and payments [17]. 

Ramp followed a similar arc. They launched in 2020 with corporate cards focused on expense visibility and savings [18]. The expense data wedge led to bill pay in 2021, then travel booking , then procurement, then treasury management in 2025 [19]. 

Same playbook: get the wedge and then expand.

For founders evaluating their own positioning: don't ask "what market can I serve?" 

Ask "what specific workflow can I dominate, that gives me a path to more?"