Exclusive: AI startup Sapien raises at $180M valuation to help companies find what’s really driving profit

Sapien has closed a new funding round led by Neo’s Ali Partovi at a $180 million valuation, a fresh vote of confidence for a startup that’s trying to sell more than faster spreadsheets. The company started out in financial planning and analysis, but it now wants to be the system companies use to trace financial results back to the operational choices behind them.

That shift shows up in the customers. Bayer, Carlex, Cooper Standard, Blink Charging and Westgate Resorts are among the companies using Sapien, and the platform is being applied well beyond planning and forecasting. At Carlex, a forthcoming case study reviewed by Fortune showed Sapien rebuilding a profitability analysis and flipping the conclusion on its head: what the company thought was contributing $10 million in positive EBITDA was actually creating a $2 million drag. Sapien then found another $1.5 million opportunity in a customer-channel pattern the team hadn’t been examining. The work took about 20 minutes.

That speed is the pitch, but the real sell is judgment. Jason Waltz, business unit VP of finance for Carlex’s Aftermarket Division, said the same analysis would likely have taken two weeks and still might not have reached that level of detail. Sapien is trying to make that kind of investigation routine, not exceptional. Carlex has since expanded its use into pricing, inventory, customer orders, OEM quoting, supply chain and operations. Cooper Standard and Blink Charging are using it in similar ways, with analyses that once took hours or days being cut to minutes.

The company was founded in 2024 by Ron Nachum, Pranav Ravella and Arya Grayeli, who met in high school before later attending Harvard, Stanford and the University of Texas at Austin. Sapien raised an $8.7 million seed round led by General Catalyst, and headcount has grown fivefold over the past year, with hires from Meta, Google, Palantir, McKinsey & Company, Blackstone, Barclays and Plaid. That mix says a lot about the product: this is not being built as another dashboard or, as Nachum puts it, an “Excel copilot.” It’s meant to be a system that finds the operational decisions that actually move revenue, margins and cash flow.