Corporate Profile: RMI Insights

The Denver-based software firm RMI Insights, which is in the process of closing on its Series A financing from select Institutional Venture Capital Investors, is growing fast.

RMI Insights is a leading provider of Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) and Corporate Strategy software to small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) and the Middle Market (MM). The company’s cloud-based, data-driven FP&A automation and visualization tool helps companies aggregate, synthesize, analyze and visualize key financial and operational data. The tool takes data from companies’ key three financial statements — income statement, balance sheet and statement of cash flows — and through machine learning and artificial intelligence helps executives and investors better conceptualize actual vs. projected performance, key performance indicators, and benchmarking against competition. Custom reports can analyze employee productivity, technology/marketing spend and the sales pipeline for the present, future targets and differences that arise between the two.

Business owners in the SMB space often don’t know the power of data analytics, or they don’t have the time or budget to invest in a system that can analyze massive amounts of information from multiple sources, RMI Insights founder Varun P. Balan says. “Most people just close their books at the end of the month,” he says. “Instead of looking at what happened, one should be looking at what should happen going forward, but there is usually so much going on with the business in the present or in the past that it is hard to focus on the future.”

For example, Balan says, a car dealership can better understand its business by analyzing and visualizing key net working capital drivers (and their implications as they relate to financial forecasts), such as what their Days Sales Outstanding metrics (DSO) are for new cars, used cars, servicing, parts, etc., then decide whether to adjust sales or payment strategies going forward. “Our technology goes into the level of detail that most SMBs and the MM don’t operate on,” he says. “It empowers them to analyze their businesses the same way a Fortune 500 company does.”

Balan, who was born in Colorado Springs, holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Applied Mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering, and a Bachelor of Arts in Political Economy from the University of Pennsylvania. He began his career as an investment banker in the Real Estate, Gaming & Lodging Investment Banking Group at J.P. Morgan. He launched his business in 2014 and experienced first-hand the challenge of working with limited resources.

“When I was at J.P. Morgan, we had the resources we needed there,” he says. “We could get anything from anywhere for our clients. When I started the company, we were resource-constrained. We didn’t have the resources to access the right technology, tools or people.”

RMI Insights now has two Denver offices and clients representing real estate, health care, energy, media and hospitality, among other industries. Revenue has grown at an average of 215 percent year-over-year, and the company plans to present at the Google Cloud Next Conference in April.

“We’re in a data-driven world,” Balan says. “Those who know how to utilize data by connecting it, understanding it, analyzing it and distilling insights from these disparate data sources will succeed in the current and future environment.”

(This sponsored content was provided by RMI Insights)