A London-founded AI startup has raised £2.7m in seed funding to bring generative AI into the world of financial modelling.
Tracelight, which was founded in 2024 by Peter Fuller, Aleksander Misztal, and 11x founding engineer Janek Zimoch, will also use the fresh investment to grow its team and support further product development as it scales to serve customers globally.
The product is available now as an Excel add-in via the Microsoft Add-In Store and is targeted at analysts, consultants and finance professionals.
The round was led by Chalfen Ventures, with participation from Acequia Capital, Inovo and Entrepreneur First.
Angel investors including Charlie Songhurst, former head of corporate strategy at Microsoft, and Suhit Gupta, previously CIO at General Atlantic and Carlyle, further contributed to the round.
Tracelight links spreadsheets with large language models (LLMs). Its technology converts spreadsheet logic into a format that LLMs can interpret, helping to enable tasks like writing complex formulas, validating models and running analysis via simple natural language prompts.
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Rather than replace analysts, the tool automates repetitive work and augments human decision-making.
Since launch, the business has seen early traction among investment banks, private credit and equity firms, as well as professional services organisations.
“Complex financial models underpin all of the corporate world’s most important decisions,” said CEO Fuller.
“Until now, LLMs have barely touched this workflow. Tracelight is purpose-built for this; it works seamlessly inside the tools analysts already trust.
“Our aim is to take away the entire mechanical workload of financial modelling. Our users act as directors and orchestrators of AI that is quickly becoming superhuman at the task of Excel analysis.”
Mike Chalfen of Chalfen Ventures added: “The most magical AI tools work at the highest level of abstraction, making them radically easy to adopt, while understanding and executing complex work under the hood. Tracelight does that.
“It has taken the world’s most widely used modelling platform and embedded AI where it can have immediate impact.
“And its rapid adoption by analysts in demanding modelling environments shows just how big the opportunity is.”