Building a Venture Scale FinTech SaaS Startup: Mike Whitmire, co-founder and CEO of FloQast (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Now, if you lift yourself a little bit on the product philosophy level, what are you seeing right now? Is it human-in-the-loop? Is it real agent-to-AI automation? What is your product roadmap philosophy, and what are you seeing in the market in terms of what is acceptable for customers?

Mike Whitmire: There’s no single answer to that question. The really effective accounting departments of the future will use a combination of automated workflows and truly agentic workflows completed by AI. What’s important is maintaining audit readiness. If technology is making a decision, you need a human in the loop to check, review, and approve the work.

At FloQast, we ask: how do we use AI and automation to prepare work for the company, and then elevate the preparer into a reviewer who tests the AI’s judgment? That’s where human-in-the-loop becomes critical.

In a typical end-to-end accounting workflow, which might have 10 or 100 steps, many can be automated. But for challenging parts or anything subject to audit, a human needs to review and sign off. That’s how you pass audits and ensure accuracy.

Elevating preparers into reviewers is something we talk about a lot at FloQast.

Sramana Mitra: Very good. You’re starting to bridge into the AI era. The product roadmap is moving in that direction. You have over $300 million in funding and over 3,200 customers. What kind of revenue level are you at?

Mike Whitmire: I’m comfortable sharing that we’re approaching a quarter billion in ARR. It’s been a fun journey. We’re reaching good scale now. The focus is on continuing to deliver value, automating more work, and growing revenue as we deliver more value to customers.

Sramana Mitra: Where is the impact of AI going to be in terms of your P&L? What are the main pillars? Will it show up in internal productivity or in the product line?

Mike Whitmire: This is a really interesting new world of SaaS. Historically, SaaS companies relied on customer expansion—selling more seats. That’s changing, especially in accounting. There’s a big talent gap—there aren’t enough accountants now, and that’ll worsen.

Companies can either offshore or automate using AI. We want to provide a platform that helps clients automate their work. The future of expansion revenue will come from automation value, not from adding users.

So, our growth will be based on how much automation and value we deliver. We might start with an agent or workflow, and if it delivers value, that drives our revenue. It’s a major shift in pricing models in accounting, and we’re at the forefront of that.

Sramana Mitra: Will that still be subscription revenue or impact-based?

Mike Whitmire: It’ll still be subscription revenue but more aligned to the value we deliver. I like engineering tools like Replit, but their pricing is opaque. CFOs and accountants prefer predictable pricing.

Sramana Mitra: Right. Your goal is to become a public company. Predictability and repeatability are golden.

Mike Whitmire: Exactly. I can’t go to a customer and say it costs 0.07 tokens per workflow. That doesn’t work for our buyers. It’s a different kind of conversation.

Sramana Mitra: Fabulous. Congratulations. Great story and great progress since we last talked.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Building a Venture Scale FinTech SaaS Startup: Mike Whitmire, co-founder and CEO of FloQast
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