An AI CFO
for founders.
For the founder who's been doing the books in a Notion doc.
Three things to look at today.
CAC at 2.1× target.
Spend up 38% w/w, signups flat. Pause tonight — saves ~$24K this month.
Acquia closed — largest deal of Q2.
+$18.4K MRR. ARR past $2.9M.
Notion charged you twice — $96 duplicate.
Posted to your AmEx 12 minutes ago. Same invoice ID. Want me to file the refund?
You're the CFO, and you shouldn't be.
Plug it in.
The picture fills itself in.
Stripe, your bank, payroll, ads, accounting — whichever you already use. Zift unlocks more of your money picture as each source connects. Start with one. Add the rest at your pace.
- One-click integrations · OAuth, no spreadsheets, no Sunday-night reconciliation
- Works with what you have · Stripe, Mercury, Brex, Ramp, QuickBooks, Gusto, and more
- Always up to date · the ledger refreshes every 15 minutes
- Your data stays yours · read-only by default, deletable on request
Your connections
Caught before it becomes a Friday-night problem.
Vendor double-charges. A campaign blowing through its budget. A bill posting you weren't expecting. Zift catches it, tells you what happened, and recommends the fix.
- Plain-English alerts · no jargon, no dashboard to check
- The recommended action · pause this, file that, ignore this one
- Slack or email · whichever you actually read
- One-tap actions · approve the refund, snooze the alert, ask follow-ups
This week
Duplicate charge — $96.
Posted to your AmEx 12m ago. File refund?
CAC at 2.1× target.
$24K projected overrun this month. Pause the “ICP-Series-A” set tonight.
A short note,
every Monday.
Cash, burn, MRR, runway. Three things to look at this week. Three minutes to read. Reply with a question and Zift answers — same data, same place.
- Delivered Mondays at 8 AM · email or Slack, your call
- 3-minute read · written like a colleague, not a chatbot
- Reply to ask · turns into a conversation when you need one
- Skips the weeks nothing moves· won't email you for the sake of it
Three things to look at today.
CAC at 2.1× target.
Pause tonight — saves ~$24K this month.
A real CFO, in your inbox.
Ask anything. Modeling, hiring trade-offs, fundraise math, board prep. Answered in seconds, from your real numbers — not a stale spreadsheet.
- Plain English in, plain English out · no formula bar required
- Real numbers · pulled from your live connections, not estimates
- Drafts the artifact · board updates, investor emails, scenario summaries
- The math is honest · deterministic engine, no hallucinated figures
See the next eighteen months before they happen.
Drag a slider — add a hire, raise a price, cut a campaign. Zift recomputes runway, burn, and MRR live, against your real numbers. Save scenarios. Compare them. Pick the one that actually works.
- One slider, one chart · no model maintenance, no broken cells
- Save and compare· base case, stretch, “what if it goes south”
- Honest answers· runway in months, what you'd need to extend it
- Set a tripwire · Zift alerts you the moment reality drifts off the scenario
Scenario · +1 hire
Board updates, without the panic.
Every month, Zift drafts your investor update from real data. Numbers, narrative, what changed, what's next. You edit, you send. Three hours of work, done in ten minutes.
- Monthly investor email · drafted on the 1st, your voice
- Board deck · KPI grid, narrative, asks — match your existing template
- One-pager export· forward to anyone who asks “how's it going?”
- Investor-grade math· the numbers won't embarrass you
May update · draft
Founders who'd rather be building than reconciling.
Get the numbers, lose the spreadsheet.
You don't have a finance person. You shouldn't need one yet.
One screen, one number, one decision.
Cash, burn, runway. Read in three minutes. Get back to work.
Board-ready, without a board ops hire.
Monthly investor update drafted from real numbers.
The CFO you'd never hire.
No VC to report to. Just clarity on whether the math works.
A copilot for your part-time finance person.
Stop being the bottleneck between Stripe and the board.
Six things Zift does so you don't have to.
A short note,
every Monday.
Cash, burn, MRR, runway. Three things to look at this week. Auto-delivered at 8 AM. Reads in three minutes.
Three things to look at today.
What moved today.
Answers in plain English.
Drag, see the future.
Eighteen months ahead, live.
Drafted on the 1st.
We've done this job
at the last four
startups we built.
Every time, the founder spent more hours on finances than the work was worth. Every time, the clarity made fundraising easier and the decisions less scary — knowing when to hire, when to spend, when to slow down.
Most founders never get that clarity, because there's no one in the room to give it to them. A fractional CFO costs three to eight thousand a month. A real one is a Series-A decision. So the founder reads Founder CFO blog posts at midnight and tries to glue something together in Notion.
Zift is what we wished existed every time. It's the work we kept doing, automated. It's the colleague we kept being, in software.
If you've ever pasted a CSV into Claude and asked it to be your CFO — we built that, properly.
Recent thinking.
Marketplace Take Rate Is the Only Number That Matters. GMV Is Vanity.
founders pitching marketplaces lead with gmv. investors discount it instantly. take rate × retention is the only revenue signal that survives diligence.
The Investor Reference Call That Passes on You
investors do back-channel references on every term sheet. founders rarely hear the bad ones. the language is consistent and worth recognizing.
Eval Cost Is the AI Line Item Nobody Budgets For
every ai startup runs evals. nobody puts them in gross margin. at scale, eval cost is 12-20% of inference and it sits in the wrong line.