About finstory
Why we built finstory
Imagine it's 11pm and just two days before the board meeting, and the CFO is still at their desk.
The books closed a week ago and the numbers are right. The story is what's missing. So someone exports a stack of reports, pastes tables into slides, fixes the chart that broke again, and tries to remember why marketing went over budget in March. The answer is in an email from six weeks ago, and nobody can find it.
Then a board member asks the one question the deck doesn't answer. The CFO spends the rest of the meeting defending a number when they should be talking about the business.
Between us, we've watched this happen for more than 10 years.
Smart finance people do copy-and-paste work a machine should have taken off them years ago, and then they get judged on how the slides look when they should be judged on what they know.
The AI tools we tried didn't fix it.
They wrote lovely paragraphs and got the numbers wrong. In finance, one wrong number means the board stops trusting the whole deck and the CFO who presented it.
So we built finstory to take over the part that eats your week.
It reads your own ledger and quotes every number exactly as it sits in your books. When the data can't explain a variance, it asks the person who knows. It never guesses. You get a board pack drafted in an afternoon, and you can trace every figure back to its source.
Your systems
Your financial semantic layer
Board-ready story in Claude
- NetSuite
- Adaptive
- BigQuery
- Excel
- Other
- Data
- Reports
- Company memory
- Built to SOC 2 standards
Claude
Gross margin up 1.4 pts
Driven by marketplace mix and corporate sales.
- Full narrative
- Key drivers
- Trace to source
The judgment stays with you, and so does the decision about what the board hears. You just stop losing your nights building the deck.
Team
Wouter Born
Founder and CEO
Wouter has spent 25 years working where finance, technology, and AI meet. More than 51,000 finance leaders read his AI CFO Office newsletter. He started finstory to give CFOs back the week they lose to board packs. And he's a CFOTech investor, advisor, and GP at Born Capital.
LinkedIn
Joost Vogelezang
Co-founder and COO
Joost has spent more than 30 years building operations and customer teams that scale. Most recently he was COO at Simply Deliver, and before that he ran global support and client success at insightsoftware. At finstory, his job is making sure every customer actually gets the result we promise.
LinkedIn
Matias Panario
Co-founder and CTO
Matias has spent more than 15 years inside Oracle Hyperion and EPM, the planning systems large finance teams run on. He has seen how finance data really behaves in telecom, retail, mining, insurance, pharma and consumer goods, and that experience is why finstory doesn't guess.
LinkedIn
Ali Bilawal
Co-founder and Growth Officer
Ali writes about AI and finance for CFOs. He is a brand and content strategist for CFO Office founders. He writes for the AI in Finance newsletter at finstory, and he works with Wouter on the AI CFO Office. He helps executives with social media growth and storytelling.
LinkedIn