Despite millions of people spending on financial software, many financial teams still rely on Excel to close books and adjust numbers while preparing for audits. Two former Microsoft executives see it as a problem. And they launched Maximor to replace spreadsheets with AI agents for the performance of the Grunt Work Finance team.
Excel spreadsheets are everywhere in finance. Even with dedicated ERP, CRM and billing systems, many medium-sized companies and companies still export their transactions to Excel for manual adjustments. Teams often treat spreadsheets as a makeshift database, and sometimes rely on functions like vlookup (a function used to subtract matching numbers from one table to another) to arrange diagrams between files.
Maximor aims to rely on Excel and rely on AI systems, emerging from stealth with a $9 million seed round led by Foundation Capital.
Startups use a network of AI agents that connect directly to ERP, CRM, and billing systems to continually extract transactions. Co-founder and CEO Ramnandan Krishnamurthy (pictured above, right) said in an exclusive interview, helping to provide unified operational and financial data and real-time financial awareness, waiting to sort it all out, rather than wait until the end of the month.
He believes this approach should help reduce the time required at the end of the month. For example, Maximor said the Proptech company was one of its early clients, cutting deadlines from eight to four days and avoiding the recruitment of two additional accounting users. Railing’s CFO Dustin Neal said Railly was able to redirect half of his team’s time to strategic work after using Maxim’s agent platform.
Maximor’s financial agents connect to ERPs such as NetSuite and Intacct, accounting tools such as QuickBooks and Zoho Books, as well as a variety of payroll, CRM and other SaaS platforms. When connected, it generates work papers, reviewer notes, and audit trajectories to help streamline your audits.
Maximor aims to reduce dependency on Excel, but allows teams to export tailored data to a spreadsheet.
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“We are interoperable with Excel in that part so that our platform is doing the work and can present it directly in our own UI or Excel,” Krishnamurthy told TechCrunch.
In addition to AI agents, Maximor offers human accountants as a loop-in option for AI work or as an accounting service for companies without an in-house financial team. It’s an interesting failure considering Maximor pitches itself as an AI startup that automates this task. Relying on humans may seem at odds with that promise.
However, Krishnamurthy told TechCrunch that the software is self-sufficient and that the agents handle end-to-end work independently. He said agents act as creators, people act as reviewers, junior staff handle daily tasks and function in the same way as traditional accounting teams where managers focus on oversight.
Krishnamurthy co-founded Maximor in the summer of 2024 as a founding member of the Digital Transformation Group several years later at Microsoft, leading financial and data projects for Fortune 500 clients, including Coca-Cola. He teamed up with Ajay Krishna Amudan (now CTO), who previously worked on improving Microsoft’s internal revenue system. The two began working together for 14 years as students at IIT-Madras.
The duo’s financial experience at Microsoft has helped attract angel investors, such as CFOs and finance leaders at accounting firms at RAMP, Gusto, Mongodb, Zuora and Big Four, said Krishnamurthy. The seed round also attracted Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, former IIT-Madras classmate of Krishnamurthy, and Zuora CEO Tien Tzuo, who was featured by VCS, who supports the round. Institutional investors Gaiaventure and BoldCap also participated.
Maximer, headquartered in New York with his Bengaluru office, has 18 employees divided roughly evenly between the US and India, actively employing them in both locations. The startup targets companies that have earned at least $50 million in revenue, and already counts early clients in the US, China and India. Additionally, Maximor’s software supports both GAAP and IFRS standards, and is compatible with companies with a global footprint.
