[Zaimo Corporation] Liberation from Excel Hell. Next-Gen XP&A Platform where AI Agents Automatically Generate Business Plans to Realize \"Collective Management\"

Solving the Planning & Analysis Trade-off: Building the AI Co-pilot for CFOs

Hello everyone, I am Takumi Kojo, Representative Director of Zaimo Corporation. Today, I would like to present \"Zaimo.ai FP&A,\" an AI-native platform designed to make financial modeling, planning, and analysis accessible and easy for everyone.

Our mission is to support all aspects of corporate financial management, including financial modeling (business planning), variance analysis, and reporting, establishing an AI agent that acts as the ultimate \"right hand\" for CFOs and corporate planners.

Our team's core strength lies in our deep domain expertise in finance combined with advanced AI technology. Personally, I have spent over 10 years handling financial modeling and management control at venture capital firms, consulting firms, and securities companies. Our engineering is led by Inoue, a veteran startup and public-company CTO, and our AI strategy is advised by Kim, a director at the University of Tokyo's Matsuo Lab, ensuring a robust development team.

We are a seed-stage startup in our third year. We have raised approximately 100 million yen from venture capital firms such as Deloitte Tohmatsu Ventures and DEEPCORE. Recently, we were selected for Global Brain's accelerator program \"XLIMIT,\" which includes additional capital investment. Furthermore, to integrate with the broader startup ecosystem, we have joined the Japan Business Federation (Keidanren).

Today, with rising interest rates and high market volatility, precise planning and KPI management are more critical than ever. Yet, corporate planning remains deeply flawed. Editing business plans, consolidating variance data, and generating reports are highly manual, labor-intensive, and siloed, resulting in extremely low agility.

While many FP&A SaaS products exist, most focus solely on data consolidation and importing. They remain weak in future simulations and financial modeling. Trying to build advanced planning tools within SaaS often results in complex, hard-to-use user interfaces—a severe trade-off between detail and simplicity.

We believed that the emergence of LLMs (Large Language Models) could eliminate this trade-off. We can now offer highly detailed planning within a simple user interface. By building an AI-native platform today, we aim to capture the global defacto standard.

Excel Interface with Database Robustness: Mid-Market XP&A Connecting Executives to the Frontline

In global markets, the concept of \"XP&A (Extended Planning and Analysis)\" is rapidly spreading. XP&A connects corporate executives with frontline business units to facilitate collaborative planning and agile decision-making.

Zaimo is designed to bring XP&A to life. Our primary target is mid-market companies where management complexity rises as departments multiply.

With Zaimo, users simply upload their accounting CSV files, specify columns for departments or tags, and the system automatically structures a department-level management accounting database.

For plan creation, we use a grid interface that mimics Excel. The user experience is identical to Excel, but the backend is a robust database. There are no formula errors or corrupted spreadsheets. Users can easily model and simulate complex business logics on the screen.

From Target Target to KPI Parameters: Demoing AI Auto-Generation of Business Plans in 10 Seconds

Let me introduce Zaimo's core feature: AI Financial Modeling.

A user tells the AI agent via chat, in natural language: \"I want to build a business plan for [X] period using [Y] business model.\" The AI instantly analyzes and proposes the most suitable logic template from our library of over 100 industry-specific models.

Once the template is selected, the user sets the primary conditions: \"Make the target revenue 100 million yen in one year. Set SMB pricing to [X] and Enterprise pricing to [Y].\" The AI then automatically reverse-calculates all remaining parameters (such as customer acquisition pace and churn rate) to generate a balanced, fully populated draft plan in seconds.

Of course, users can easily fine-tune these generated numbers on the Excel-like grid interface.

Moving forward, we will expand the capabilities of our AI agent beyond plan generation to include dashboard customization and automated variance analysis reports.

Standardizing GTM: 0-Yen Entry for Startups and VC Ecosystem Dynamics

Our Go-To-Market strategy is highly structured.

For startups and small businesses, we will offer a free trial and eventually reduce the price to \"0 yen\" (completely free). Many early-stage startups start planning using free templates on Excel or Google Sheets, which later creates \"Excel Hell.\" Our message is simple: \"If you are going to write a business plan, use Zaimo for 0 yen instead of Excel from day one.\" We will capture the market early.

We will then monetize mid-market and enterprise customers who require departmental accounting and advanced organizational control, charging subscription fees ranging from 100,000 yen to over 1,000,000 yen per month based on account count and data volume.

Furthermore, Zaimo provides massive value to Venture Capital (VC) and CVC firms.

VCs manage portfolios of dozens or hundreds of companies. However, the financial plans and reports submitted by these startups are completely fragmented in format, making portfolio-wide monitoring incredibly labor-intensive.

By adopting Zaimo, VCs can allow startups to maintain their unique revenue and cost structures while standardizing their input parameters and summary PLs. VC reviewers can view their entire portfolio's financial health in a standardized format, switching between companies as if switching channels on Slack. This convenience encourages VCs to demand that their startups use Zaimo, creating a viral loop that accelerates our adoption across the ecosystem.

The global addressable market for management accounting software is estimated at 15 trillion yen. In this massive space where Excel remains the only defacto standard, we will establish the new global benchmark as an AI-native agent.

We plan to raise our Pre-Series A funding round in the first half of next year. We look forward to connecting with investors and companies aiming to elevate their financial planning. Thank you very much.

Questions & Answers

Commentator (Mr. Toyama): Thank you, Mr. Kojo. Back when I was working on management control and CFO duties at SoftBank, we opened blank Excel sheets and manually built complex financial models line by line. It was incredibly stressful trying to prevent formula errors. Seeing an AI agent build models and reverse-calculate variables automatically is highly impressive.

Looking at your website, you have pricing tiers around 4,980 yen and 9,880 yen. Could you explain the differences and your customer acquisition approach?

Mr. Kojo: Thank you for the question. The primary difference between our current 5,000 yen and 10,000 yen plans is whether users can directly download Excel files with formulas intact. Our Basic plan (10,000 yen) allows users to export Zaimo models into functional Excel files.

However, whether users perceive 10,000 yen as cheap or expensive depends heavily on their financial literacy and whether they have experienced the pain of corporate planning. Those who know the pain purchase immediately. Founders starting out often default to Sheets because it is free.

This, however, is the beginning of Excel Hell. Once data becomes fragmented, it is very hard to fix. To prevent this, we plan to make our starter tier \"0 yen\" (completely free). We want founders to choose Zaimo over Excel from day one. In turn, we will monetize mid-market and enterprise clients at 100,000 to 1,000,000 yen per month where departmental control is required.

Mr. Toyama: That makes a lot of sense. Offering a free tier to dominate the startup segment and monetizing on mid-market enterprise needs is a solid strategy.

Another question: you mentioned support for over 100 business models. In our entrepreneur club, we have construction company owners whose revenues and cash outflows mismatch heavily due to \"percentage-of-completion\" accounting. Can your platform handle such industry-specific logics?

Mr. Kojo: Yes, absolutely. We are actively expanding support for these industries.

Whether it is percentage-of-completion in construction or FL (Food & Labor) ratios in restaurants, industry-specific logics are common in management accounting. Zaimo's architectural strength is its flexibility; if a logic can be built in Excel, it can be replicated and automated in Zaimo.

Our AI agent combines industry-specific modules to build tailored plans. We recently released automated working capital calculations, and we will module-ize percentage-of-completion accounting for construction. Our goal is to enable anyone to generate industry-best-practice plans without writing complex formulas.

Mr. Toyama: Excellent. From a VC perspective, standardizing portfolio financials into a single layout would save hundreds of hours. Having VCs drive the adoption of Zaimo among their startups is a highly realistic and powerful growth driver. I have high expectations for your upcoming Pre-Series A round.

Mr. Kojo: Thank you. We will work hard to become the global standard for financial planning.