We have seen that e-commerce companies that are huge in head count as well as revenue are very few such as Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy and others in other parts of the world. However, you might have seen that there are millions of e-commerce businesses around the world. Then why do you think the head count of these companies is so less. Well, the reason is that these e-commerce companies want to be as lean as possible so that they can invest their profits in other parts of their business such as logistics and packaging etc. These companies tend to be so lean that the role of CMO, CFO, CTO and others might be handled by the CEO itself.
Now, there is a new startup named 8fig that wants to provide the Chief Financial Officer that these companies need in the form of software. 8fig, which started as a company that provided supply chain and lending management to e-commerce companies, took a pivot few years back to provide a “C-Suite” for companies who might be outsourcing the work of a CFO out of the company. The co-founders of 8fig say that “Usually these kinds of companies will never have a CFO, someone who’s actually doing the financials and all the calculations, instead using external accountants to help them,” . “This means that there’s a huge gap in their planning.”
They added that “In these turbulent times, technology can help e-commerce businesses with their planning, so you will see a lot of effort on that from us,”. “Helping our clients with only AI CFO is good, but not perfect. If we’re able to help them in their marketing and logistics, this can be super important. We are going to invest in these areas in order to help our clients to do great work themselves and to be successful in the next year and the next two years, which is the future that we are looking at.” Their product, AI CFO, offers a self-serve web application where companies can do their cash flow planning automatically, and then if they need it, can get business continuity planning from 8fig.
