Our Investment in DoubleFin — Collaborative People Planning for Modern Teams
I am excited to announce that Born Capital has made an investment in DoubleFin, a collaborative people management and planning platform for People teams, Finance business partners, and Budget owners. Reimagined from the ground up, Doublefin headcount enables organizations to leverage real-time headcount and hiring insights, analytics, and an intuitive management workflow to plan their growth intelligently.
DoubleFin leaders are former top FP&A executives at Fortune 100 tech companies. Warren Wang, CEO and co-founder of DoubleFin, spent more than 12 years working for Google as a finance director.
While leading a global team of 40 managers and analysts. Managing multi-billion marketing investmenets. Overseeing all aspects of budgeting, forecasting and monthly reporting processess. And collaborating with sales, finance, product and HR business partners. Warren realized how hard it is to do proper People Planning and how disintegrated the process is within the business.
Ha Ly, Doublefin’s COO and early investor has spent the last decade working at Google & Yahoo. Ha was drawn to Doublefin’s vision of the future where leaders have platforms in place that reflect how people planning and management should be done: collaboratively, strategically, and informed by real insights. All fast growing and complex enterprises face challenges with reliable people data and planning activities, but are only beginning to realize the cost to their organizations. DoubleFin is at the forefront of the next wave in digital transformation that bridges siloed systems and deliver a modern user experience to deliver tremendous value to operators.”
Why do organizations need Collaborative People Planning?
Regardless of an organization’s size or phase of growth, People Planning is a strategic exercise that requires real collaboration between people and talent acquisition teams, finance teams, and budget owners. Yet, organizations still rely on dated tools and processes to manage their headcount and plan for growth. HR teams rely on their trusted HRIS systems, TA teams on ATS, and Finance teams on ERPs, Spreadsheets and Payroll systems—but none of these systems talk to each other. This often results in scattered and disparate data and a long, painful planning process for all parties involved.
Collaborative people planning tools are a new generation of products that bridge the information gap and break team silos to streamline the headcount planning process. These tools provide real-time visibility and data transparency, collaborative workflows, advanced analytics, and intelligent planning capabilities. Their advanced features and multiplayer nature enables teams to get on the same page to deliver intelligent growth plans that meet the organization’s long-term and short-term goals, all within budget.
Why are we excited about DoubleFin?
Most organizations plan their headcount in Excel. Because HRM solutions don’t have the right planning features and generic FP&A solutions don’t have good support for headcount and miss the required workflows.
Excel is error-prone, has no collaboration features, lacks governance, and cannot be secured by user roles. This leads to ineffective decision making across the enterprise in anything from re-organization to simple budgeting.
There is no tool out there that combines the HR and finance aspects of headcount data in such a collaborative way. DoubleFin is one of the most competitive early stage startups to invest in right now.
DoubleFin is leading the Collaborative People Planning category which is part of the 3rd generation FP&A software movement. We believe that FP&A no longer operates as a silo, but should be a real business partner and drive strategic value for an organization.
Warren Wang, CEO and co-founder of DoubleFin:
“People and budget planning are two categories that are long overdue for innovation. Disparate email threads, excel sheets, slack conversations, and the back of napkins are poor ways to plan and manage 70% of a company’s operating budget. At Doublefin, we believe that growth is powered by cross-departmental collaboration and alignment, so we created a platform that simplifies headcount planning by providing all the stakeholders involved in the process with a 360-view of their workforce data, simple and intelligent workflows, and powerful planning capabilities.”
We are proud to support Warren Wang, CEO of DoubleFin, and Ha ly the COO and his team in making headcount planning a FP&A owned process.
I am happy to get some feedback on the product from my readers. Let me know in the comments.
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