The modern operator, whether that is a CFO, COO, VP of X, is in crisis – shrinking runway, constricting sales pipeline, and headcount reduction are just a few of the many problems on their desks. 

By necessity, today’s operators are expected to wear many different hats. They simultaneously are procurement officers, systems architects, and data analysts. Operators are stitching together piecemeal workflows from rudimentary software products. Long-tail expense reduction is a critical priority for them but it's often deprioritized because of the significant manual labor required. 

This is a problem that my co-founder Niko and I personally struggled with. While working together at two early-stage companies, we were tasked with cost reduction admin tasks. Immediately, we were grappling with outdated spreadsheets, workflows that needed to be done manually at specific times of the month, and overall failing coordination between the finance and engineering teams. We looked at some point solutions and they had a price tag up to $200,000. That made no sense to us. We wanted to cut overspend, not get another $200k software license. Additionally, they only covered a portion of expenses like SaaS. Realizing that there was no off-the-shelf, comprehensive software here, we built out a platform internally that was able to reduce our previous employers’ burn by 65% and most importantly without any manual workflows.

As belts collectively tightened, we realized that this wasn’t just a problem for those companies. Every operator, be it at a startup, small business, or enterprise, had been asked to cut burn but had no unified platform to help them accomplish this.

We started Sparx to attack this opportunity. Sparx is Truebill for businesses. Just like Truebill did for consumers, we identify areas of non-usage or overspend and automate workflows to curb such spend. These areas span SaaS, cloud, and business insurance as these categories comprise 75% of our customers’ non-payroll recurring spend. Sparx automatically cancels that wasted spend for free ($0.00), and businesses get their time and money back. 

We serve businesses of all sizes. Our beta customers include BMW, Invisalign, the National Foundation for Cancer Research, and Bill.com, and more than 100 startups and SMBs such as legal practices, accounting firms, and dental offices. Our users have collectively saved more than 12 million dollars since March using the free Sparx platform. 

We’ve been in awe of the resilience of the finance and operations professionals that we serve. With many of the large-scale RIFs that are happening, we have seen these individuals take pay cuts, work consistent 100+ hour work weeks, deal with banks failing, and still never miss payroll every week. This is all while managing disjointed workflows. 

We are building Sparx in the spirit of their resilience with the hope to make their lives easier.  

Today, we are excited to publicly launch the Sparx platform and announce that we have raised a $3.1 million seed round from Drive Capital, Thrive Capital, Human Capital, and Wicklow Capital.

This is just the starting point for Sparx. We want to build the comprehensive FinOps suite that actually keeps a business afloat without pulling more money from its pockets. That’s a tall task but it’s exactly what is needed for the modern operator. 

To the relentless ones,