Howard Katzenberg's Linkedin Analytics

Before founding Glean.ai, I spent 10 years as CFO for two major fintechs (OnDeck and Better). The finance teams I led were very analytical - we had real-time dashboards set up on every aspect of our business … except on our spending with vendors. As a result, it was difficult to know if our vendor relationships were creating value and driving ROI. That was a problem. So, at least once a year, I'd gather my team to conduct a manual audit of our vendor costs. This involved printing months worth of bills and then spending weeks - analyzing them at the line-item level, ensuring the bills complied with our contracts, manually calculating time-series trends in spreadsheets, and then asking tons of questions to budget owners. It was a time-consuming and painful process, but the last time we did this in 2019, my team identified over $1.5 million of annual savings, or about 15% of our total vendor spend at the time. That money was silently walking out the door - in the form of products/services we didn’t need, missed terminations, poorly negotiated deals, duplicative vendors, etc..💸 Importantly, it was cash we didn’t have available to increase our marketing budget to acquire more customers, hire more software engineers to improve our product, or just take to the bottom line to improve margins. Accordingly, in early 2020, I felt compelled to leave my CFO career to build a company that could automate the audit process we conducted - by using AI/ML to conduct instant spend forensics on bills and proactively identify savings opportunities. Glean.ai’s raised $14 million to date from top tier fintech investors. In 2022, not only has our customer count grown significantly, but we’ve enabled our customers to shave 13% off their annual vendor spend on average. But this is just the beginning! Our models are retrained every day, leading to faster and more accurate identification of savings opportunities for our customers. When I’m not working on Glean.ai, I spend time with my beautiful wife and 3 energetic boys in Westchester, New York. Also, you may find me rocking out at a Bruce Springsteen concert (or an E-Street cover band show)! I’d love to meet like-minded finance professionals and entrepreneurs here. Along the way I hope to impart lessons I’ve learned on developing good financial hygiene, building high-performing teams, and harnessing one's passion for creativity into entrepreneurship. If this resonates with you, let’s please connect!