Despite decades of innovation across the finance stack, one of the most critical workflows has remained stubbornly manual. Financial statement preparation is the backbone of accounting, yet controllers and accounting teams still spend weeks stitching together Excel files and Word documents, reconciling changes over email, and rechecking numbers late into audit cycles. The process is not only time-consuming, but prone to error, and difficult to audit.
At Norwest, we’ve spent years investing across the Office of the CFO, and know the most enduring companies are built by founders who have lived the problem firsthand. They understand not only what’s broken, but why it has stayed broken, and what it takes to earn trust. That domain expertise, coupled with the surge in AI-powered tools that enable companies to better solve legacy problems, is unlocking a new generation of category-defining products.
At Norwest, we’ve spent years investing across the Office of the CFO, and know the most enduring companies are built by founders who have lived the problem firsthand.
That’s what led us to Inscope, an AI-powered financial reporting platform built for accounting firms and enterprises.
Since launching in 2024, the company has seen rapid adoption, growing its customer base more than fivefold and increasing ARR by over 30×. All while instilling greater confidence in the final output.
Today, we’re excited to announce Norwest is leading the $14.5 million Series A for Inscope.
Built by Operators Who Lived the Pain
Inscope is built for both the companies preparing financials, and the firms reviewing them. CEO Mary Antony and COO Kelsey Gootnick, both CPAs and former controllers who spent years inside high-growth companies, founded Inscope to manage the exact reporting workflows the platform now automates. Including reducing handoffs, improving consistency, and compressing reporting cycles without sacrificing trust. They didn’t approach this as a generic software problem. They built it from firsthand experience with the late nights spent reconciling Excel files, chasing last-minute changes, and managing audit risk across disconnected tools.
CEO Mary Antony and COO Kelsey Gootnick, both CPAs and former controllers who spent years inside high-growth companies, founded Inscope to manage the exact reporting workflows the platform now automates.
That domain expertise is evident in how customers talk about Inscope, resonating as a product built by, and for, accounting teams. In conversations with customers, Norwest was repeatedly told that, when asked for a feature, the team delivered, often faster than expected.
Mary and Kelsey remain deeply involved with customers, treating them as true design partners and prioritizing the features that matter most. The result is an AI-native reporting platform that embeds intelligence directly into the workflow, links statements to source data, automates more than 60% of preparation, and reviews work without sacrificing auditability or trust.
Left to right: Inscope COO and Co-Founder Kelsey Gootnick, Norwest Partner Sean Jacobsohn, and Inscope CEO and Co-Founder Mary Antony.
A Category Ripe for Disruption
The broader opportunity reflects a familiar pattern we know well. It’s a mission-critical category, dominated by legacy incumbents that have layered complexity onto outdated workflows, rather than rethinking them end to end.
The financial reporting category is especially well-suited for AI-driven automation given its reliance on unstructured data, judgment-heavy workflows, and the repetitive, year-over-year nature of financial statement preparation and review. As Sean has long believed, categories like this don’t get transformed by incremental software. They get replaced by platforms designed from the ground up to challenge the assumptions embedded in legacy systems.
The financial reporting category is especially well-suited for AI-driven automation given its reliance on unstructured data, judgment-heavy workflows, and the repetitive, year-over-year nature of financial statement preparation and review.
Inscope is positioned at the center of that shift. As companies push to close faster, improve accuracy, and gain real-time operational visibility, the replacement cycle is accelerating. Inscope is redefining the system of record for financial reporting, and setting a new standard for how trust, automation, and intelligence coexist in the Office of the CFO.
What’s Next?
Norwest has a long history of backing companies serving the Office of the CFO, from early-stage innovators to category leaders. Across the firm, we’ve invested in more than 20 companies selling into the CFO organization, including companies like Adaptive Insights (acquired by Workday), Enable, FloQast, Galvanize (acquired by Diligent), Oro Labs, Spiff (acquired by Salesforce), and more.
Inscope reflects many of the characteristics we’ve seen in our most successful partnerships: founders with lived domain expertise, a product that delivers immediate and measurable ROI, and a clear path to expanding as reporting requirements grow more complex.
We’re excited to lead Inscope’s Series A and to partner closely with Mary, Kelsey, CTO Jared Tibshraeny, Head of AI Ankit Arya, and the broader team as they scale, alongside Storm Ventures Partner Dave Somers, also former Chief Product Officer at Workday.
Sean will be joining the board and looks forward to supporting the company across go-to-market, partnerships, and customer growth, drawing on Norwest’s broader CFO network and experience.
