Building a Venture Scale FinTech SaaS Startup: Mike Whitmire, co-founder and CEO of FloQast (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What’s AI doing to your business?

Mike Whitmire: We can talk about internal usage and then how it’s going into the product line. Internally, AI is a good productivity boost if you’re using generalized tools like ChatGPT. For us, we’re a Google shop, so Gemini is enabled for all our employees. It’s good for summarizing information and helping complete more generalized tasks.

Sramana Mitra: How much is engineering using AI?

Mike Whitmire: The real impact is in departments using purpose-built solutions. In engineering, tools like Cursor or GitHub Copilot help with efficiency. On the sales side, there are sales-specific tools as well. I think that’s where the big gains are—companies like FloQast are doing this for accounting, understanding pain points in specific departments and deploying AI tailored to them.

Sramana Mitra: Now let’s talk about your product roadmap. Where are you integrating AI?

Mike Whitmire: We’ve built out a platform. We started with helping organize people, then moved into automation around reconciliations and journal entry posting, which is a big part of accounting. We’ve embedded AI in a way that allows companies to automate workflows specific to them. That’s important because accounting processes vary by company.

There’s a perception that accounting is just rules and numbers, and should be easily automated—but in reality, each company has its own processes. Our platform allows customers to customize and deploy agents for their specific workflows.

To make that impactful, it has to be inside a platform like FloQast, where you can ingest data, work with it, automate related tasks, and then post journal entries or produce results useful for accountants.

Another crucial point—accounting gets audited. At larger companies, any tech used is included in the audit and presents risk. AI doing accounting work is probably the biggest tech risk yet. Because of our background in audit and accounting, we build our AI products thoughtfully to support audit requirements.

We’ve released a product called FloQast Transform, which allows you to automate workflows you do regularly—daily, weekly, monthly, annually. It’s embedded in our platform to automate end-to-end processes.

Another feature is AI Matching, which tackles tedious reconciliation work. I used to do it and wish I had FloQast back then.

The third area is around reporting—variance explanations and interpreting your data better. It’s similar to ChatGPT, where you can ask questions like “Explain this to me,” and get meaningful answers. That’s the level of AI usage we’re enabling.

We have a variety of AI offerings because our platform can support them.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Building a Venture Scale FinTech SaaS Startup: Mike Whitmire, co-founder and CEO of FloQast
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