Fazeshift: Revolutionizing Accounts Receivable

Every company wants to get paid. The machinery required to make that happen is surprisingly messy.

Once a contract gets signed, finance teams have to translate its terms into an invoice, send it to the right place, track whether it was paid, match incoming payments against outstanding invoices, chase customers when something goes wrong, and keep accounting systems up to date. At larger companies, that work can require entire teams moving between email, spreadsheets, ERPs, CRMs, banks, and payment systems.

Accounts payable has been transformed by software over the past two decades. Accounts receivable still involves an enormous amount of manual work.

Fazeshift is building a different way to run it.

A Finance Team That Runs Itself

Fazeshift automates the work that happens between a signed contract and cash arriving in the bank. Its software connects to the systems a company already uses, including platforms like Salesforce, NetSuite, QuickBooks, and Stripe, and handles workflows that traditionally sit with an AR team.

That can mean generating an invoice from the terms of a contract, figuring out which invoices correspond to an incoming payment, responding to billing questions, following up on overdue invoices, or updating records across multiple systems.

These sound like straightforward tasks until you see how many exceptions finance teams encounter every day. A customer pays several invoices with one wire. Another sends a check with incomplete information. Contract terms change. An invoice needs to be submitted through a customer’s procurement system. Someone emails the billing inbox with a question that requires understanding the entire history of an account.

Previous generations of software helped finance teams organize this work. Fazeshift is designed to actually do it.

That distinction opens up a much larger opportunity. If Fazeshift becomes the system responsible for executing accounts receivable, it can eventually sit at the center of everything that happens after a sale, from billing and collections to reconciliation and revenue operations.

They Built the Spreadsheet Too

Caitlin Leksana and Timmy Galvin met while getting their MBAs at Harvard Business School and started a company together after graduating. It was while running that business that they encountered the problem that would eventually become Fazeshift.

Their customers wanted to pay them through traditional invoices, leaving Caitlin and Timmy managing receivables themselves. Before long, they had built the same system countless companies eventually build: a color-coded spreadsheet tracking who owed what, when it was due, and whether anyone had paid.

For two people who had spent their careers around sophisticated technology and operations, the experience was hard to ignore. Money was the lifeblood of the business, yet keeping track of it required stitching together spreadsheets, email, banking systems, and accounting software by hand.

Their backgrounds also made them unusually well suited to do something about it. Caitlin had worked at BCG advising technology companies on product, operations, and pricing before becoming a founder. Timmy earned two computer science degrees from MIT, spent seven years as a nuclear submarine officer in the U.S. Navy, taught cybersecurity at the Naval Academy, and later worked on software automating financial operations.

There is a useful combination in that pairing. Caitlin understands how complicated operational systems actually work inside companies. Timmy has spent much of his career building and operating systems where reliability matters and mistakes have consequences. They experienced the AR problem as founders, but they came to it with backgrounds that made them particularly capable of solving it.

That was a big part of what drew us to them.

Software That Does the Work

Accounts receivable is easy to overlook because every individual task seems small. Send an invoice. Match a payment. Answer an email. Update the ERP. Follow up with a customer.

Put those tasks together across thousands of invoices and they become a department.

This is what makes Fazeshift interesting. The company is going after the work itself, rather than simply another line item in the finance software budget. As the product becomes capable of handling more exceptions and more of the AR process, the amount of human work it can absorb grows with it.

The timing matters. Traditional software was good at storing information and enforcing workflows, but struggled with the messy, contextual work that fills finance inboxes every day. Modern AI systems can read contracts and emails, understand unstructured information, reason across multiple systems, and decide what to do next. Work that resisted automation for decades is suddenly becoming tractable.

Accounts receivable is particularly well suited to that shift because it sits at the intersection of so many systems. The CRM knows what was sold. Contracts contain the commercial terms. The ERP records the transaction. Banks and payment processors know when money arrives. Email contains much of the context connecting everything together.

A system capable of understanding and acting across all of them can become an important piece of infrastructure inside the office of the CFO.

Why We Invested

We spend a lot of time looking for businesses where a new technical capability makes it possible to revisit a problem that software has never fully solved. Accounts receivable fits that description remarkably well.

Caitlin and Timmy had experienced the problem themselves, understood why previous generations of software had stopped short of solving it, and had the complementary backgrounds to build something fundamentally more ambitious. They were also attacking a workflow where the value to customers is unusually concrete. When software can reliably perform work that previously required people moving between half a dozen systems all day, the ROI doesn’t require much explanation.

What began as a color-coded spreadsheet at their previous company has turned into a much bigger ambition: build the software that runs accounts receivable.

That’s the company we invested in.