Dhingana founders raise $13.5 mn for latest venture, launch finance concierge for startups

Homegrown entrepreneurs and twins Swapnil Shinde and Snehal Shinde have closed a $13.5 million Series A funding round, this time for their fintech startup Zeni, the Palo Alto, California based company said on Tuesday. 

The bookkeeping fintech venture operates an artificial intelligence-powered finance concierge for startups to make its bookkeeping, accounting, and CFO services available to businesses across the United States. 

“Bookkeeping automation is a $10 billion market opportunity begging for a solution that can optimize human output and meet the needs of growing businesses. When Swapnil and Snehal said they wanted to challenge the fragmented, complex bookkeeping solutions on the market today, we knew they were the team to do it,” Ash Lilani, managing partner at Saama Capital, which led the Series A funding round, said. 

The round also saw participation from investors Amit Singhal, Sierra Ventures, SVB Financial Group, Liquid 2 Ventures, Firebolt Ventures, Dragon Capital, and Twin Ventures. Angel investors in the round included Manish Chandra, Gokul Rajaram, Ed Lu, Nickhil Jakatdar, Kunal Shah, and Anupam Mittal. 

Founded in 2019, Zeni said it has processed over $300 million in transactions in its first year, since onboarding its first paid customers in January 2020. It is now on track to process a total of $1 billion in transactions in the next 12 months, it added. 

Currently, Zeni manages over $200 million in funds every month across about 100 startup customers. 

Zeni said it uses a blend of artificial intelligence and a dedicated team of certified finance experts for its full-service finance concierge to perform daily bookkeeping as well as manage all other financial needs of its customers. 

Startup customers get real-time access to key financial insights such as burn rate, operating expenses, cash/card balance, revenue by product, month-end reports, via the Zeni Dashboard. 

Zeni’s software manages finance-related activities on behalf of its startup customers for a flat monthly fee as part of its bookkeeping, accounting, and CFO services. The activities include bill pay and invoicing; expense and receipt management; financial projections, budgeting, and financial planning and analysis (FP&A) support; payroll administration; real-time reporting via dashboard; monthly financial statements; yearly taxes and R&D credit. 

“Startup founders are flying blind daily because they don’t have access to a timely, accurate snapshot of their business finances. We’re giving founders and startup decision makers real-time visibility, control, and expert support with a finance solution that can finally keep pace with their growing business” Zeni co-founder and CEO Swapnil Shinde said. 

Swapnil Shinde and Snehal Shinde previously co-founded AI-powered travel assistant Mezi in 2015, and social music streaming service Dhingana in 2007. While Sunnyvale, California-based Mezi was sold to American Express in 2018, Pune-based Dhingana was sold to San Francisco-based digital music service Rdio in March 2014. 

Even as transactional details of the acquisitions were not disclosed, each of the two ventures were heavily backed startups in the venture capital world then.