Building a Venture Scale FinTech SaaS Startup: Mike Whitmire, co-founder and CEO of FloQast (Part 1)

Mike has raised over $300M and built an over $250M ARR FinTech SaaS business. Now, AI offers FloQast an opportunity to further strengthen their product roadmap with deep domain knowledge.

Sramana Mitra: All right, Mike. We’ve talked before, so there’s some familiarity, but it’s been a while—we last spoke in 2018. Let’s give our audience a bit more context before we dive into what you’re doing now. Could you give a quick summary of your entrepreneurial journey leading up to FloQast?

Mike Whitmire: FloQast is an accounting transformation platform. What’s unique about us is that we’re created by accountants for accountants. I started my career by majoring in accounting, got my CPA, and went to Ernst & Young in Los Angeles, where I began auditing entertainment companies. Since I was in LA, it made sense. I audited a mix of private and public companies, including some fast-growing ones. It gave me great experience.

After four years of long hours, I decided to try working in industry to see what it was like on the other side. I was selective—I wanted a pre-IPO company so I could go through that journey of taking a company public. I was fascinated by the requirements and wanted to help scale an organization.

I got lucky. In LA, there weren’t many pre-IPO software companies at the time. But in 2009, I found one—Cornerstone OnDemand. I was roughly the 100th employee. They had bootstrapped to about $20 million in recurring revenue, which was significant back then. They had just raised their first round of venture capital and were preparing to go public. Growth accelerated rapidly.

I was the fifth accounting hire, tasked with helping scale operations and prepare for IPO. When I joined, there was no month-end close process, we were using QuickBooks, and we hadn’t been audited by a big four firm. It was a whirlwind getting everything in order for public company readiness—going through the SEC process, and so on.

After we went public, I became the “special projects guy,” working on Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, international expansion, new offices, and M&A. As part of M&A, I’d help integrate acquired companies, learning about their accounting operations and standardizing them at HQ.

At the time, there was no good software for managing accounting operations—especially the month-end close and reconciliation processes. These are critical because they set the stage for SEC reporting, SOX audits, and FP&A. Yet, controllers and CFOs had no visibility into close status. It was hard to keep teams aligned and to standardize processes. That became the inspiration for FloQast.

By 2013, I was getting so many questions about our accounting operations during acquisitions that I had an “aha” moment—there had to be a better way. I was using Salesforce a lot for revenue accounting, which is complex. I thought, sales teams have Salesforce to manage opportunities and forecast outcomes. Why don’t accountants have a similar tool?

There was a clear need for something to manage workloads, track progress, and ensure timely close—to support planning, reporting, and SOX compliance. That was the jump-off point. I quit my job at the end of 2013, recruited co-founders, and we started building the software. We went to market in early 2015.

Sramana Mitra: So this has now been 10 years in the making?

Mike Whitmire: Exactly. We started selling on January 1st, 2015, and we’ve been at it ever since—approaching 10 years now. Today, over 3,200 clients use FloQast. We’ve expanded internationally with offices in the U.S., London, and Sydney, and we have just over 800 employees—most of them in the U.S. It’s been a really fun journey, bringing on great people and continuing to scale the company.

Sramana Mitra: Is your go-to-market strategy mostly focused on large enterprises and the higher end of mid-sized businesses?

Mike Whitmire: Yes. We started with the mid-market—specifically, companies that looked like Cornerstone when I joined. We targeted pre-IPO software companies where our story resonated. We partnered with them, helped them scale, and co-developed our product based on their needs. That helped us move upmarket.

We’ve since added more to our go-to-market engine. We still focus on the mid-market, but as we’ve expanded the team, we’ve increasingly focused on the enterprise segment. Now we’re able to support much larger accounts as well.