Client Partner - Microsoft

The journey of Aleph began with a simple, yet profound, realization by its co-founder and CEO, Albert Gozzi. Having experienced the frustrations and limitations of existing Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) solutions firsthand, both as a CFO and an engineer, Gozzi envisioned a new approach. He observed that many finance teams, despite the availability of sophisticated web-based tools, still found themselves reverting to the familiar and flexible environment of spreadsheets for critical tasks. These dedicated FP&A tools often tried to replace Excel or Google Sheets entirely, forcing users to learn new syntaxes and conform to rigid models that didn't always align with diverse business needs. This often led to months-long implementations with a slow time-to-value.

Driven by the desire to solve these real-world problems, Gozzi embarked on a mission to create a 'spreadsheet-first' FP&A tool. The core idea was to supercharge the flexibility of spreadsheets by addressing their inherent weaknesses, such as a lack of real-time data connections and robust collaboration features, especially when scaling operations. This vision started to take shape in 2020, with Gozzi building the minimum viable product from his home during the pandemic. In 2021, Santiago Perez De Rosso, with a Ph.D. from MIT and experience at DocuSign, joined as co-founder and CTO, bringing further technical expertise to the nascent company. Their collaborative efforts led to Aleph's acceptance into the prestigious Y Combinator program, providing a crucial launchpad for their innovative platform. The name 'Aleph' itself is symbolic, drawn from a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, representing a point in space containing all other points – a metaphor for how Aleph aims to centralize and provide a 360-degree view of a business's financial data without distortion or confusion. Today, Aleph is empowering finance teams at companies like Turo, Notion, Zapier, and Envoy to make better, faster decisions by providing a single source of truth for all their financial data, seamlessly integrating with existing workflows and automating repetitive tasks.