She Transformed CFO’s Most Tiresome Chore Into A $91M AI Finance Startup Darling

Rebecca Schwartz visits theCUBE at New York Stock Exchange to discuss Series B raise – Sept 30 20205

Tabs via TheCube NYSE Wired

While the debate around AI hype rages on, Rebecca Schwartz has little interest in grand predictions. As cofounder of Tabs, she’s using AI to solve the kind of financial churn that many companies have long learned to subconsciously tolerate, and just raised a $55 million Series B to prove there’s power in pragmatism.

Fresh from closing the latest round, led by Lightspeed and bringing Tabs’ total funding to over $91 million, Schwartz shares that while many see enterprise tech as an intimidating challenge, Tabs was born from a realization that sometimes solutions to complex pain points are almost laughably simple. In the case of Tabs, it centered on four words she wants every CFO to hear – ‘send your invoice faster.’

I sat down with Rebecca Schwartz to talk about why she chose one of the hardest arenas in tech, enterprise software, and how she’s building Tabs into the next pillar of the CFO stack by betting on AI to drive efficiency.

Inside the AI Finance Startup Simplifying How CFOs Get Paid

Schwartz entered Primary Venture Partners’ Operators-in-Residence program in late 2022 with no clear intention to start a company. Instead, she went to task as a professional problem spotter. She set about interviewing operators, surfacing pain points, and mapping patterns across a broad sample of organizations. What she uncovered was both mundane and glaring: companies had modernized payroll and expenses, but the path from contract to cash was still a quagmire. “What can we sell? What can we contract? What’s in the CRM? What’s in the spreadsheet where we track revenue? None of these tie out,” she says. “The collaboration required to make the process work was full of friction.”

The answer became Tabs, a New York–based platform built to automate the order-to-cash cycle for B2B companies, which she founded with fellow primary colleagues Ali Hussain and Deepak Bapat. Their pitch, like the problem they sought to solve, sounded unnervingly simple: give CFOs the same kind of “pillar tool” for revenue that other fast- growth Fintech players were creating for HR.

“If you don’t get an invoice out fast enough, there’s no opportunity to get paid faster,” says Schwartz. “The easiest way to extend runway is to collect the cash you’re already owed.” For Shwartz and her co-founders, that meant building deep-ops platforms around revenue operations, billing, or fintech stacks means competing in a space that’s undoubtedly challenging and remarkably wide open for disruption.

How This AI Finance Startup Automates the CFO Stack

Eyeing the opportunity from a front row seat, Schwartz wasn’t just tackling a hard problem; she was also staking a claim in a space where there are few female voices and even fewer scale precedents, proving that platforms around invoicing, collections, billing, and AI-enhanced cash flow are arenas where women can lead and win.

Their timing coincided with the mass rise of generative AI in the public domain, and coincidentally, the friction they faced is where AI came home to roost. Her thesis is clear: tedious, rules-based work is where AI has immediate applicability. “Really experienced, highly paid folks are spending time doing unbelievably manual tasks,” she says. “Accounting is a perfect example. We are empowering the users of our products with AI agents. I see that as giving them superpowers to do their work more efficiently, more effectively, and with less need for more tools, systems, or extra humans. This isn’t the glossy “AI replaces your job” fantasy. It’s AI as an assistant, essentially an invoice-sending, contract-matching, cash-collecting sidekick.”

Building Culture Inside an AI Finance Startup in New York

Tabs is unusual in the world of fast-growth Fintech in having a culture that is fully in-person in New York. “It’s necessary,” Schwartz says, “it creates an unbelievable fuel. We’re shoulder-tapping engineers, sitting with customer support, whiteboarding with product. I don’t know how you could start a startup any other way.”

The rituals are intentionally small-scale and human. “Bagel Fridays. Pancakes the morning of our announcement,” she laughs. “It’s not about parties. It’s the small stuff and small moments together as a team that really matter.”

As a female founder, she’s been deliberate about recruiting. “I’ve played a really active role in hiring excellent women in every function, even where it’s harder from a numbers standpoint,” she says. Beyond the company, she leans on New York’s early-stage networks and female-founder communities like Female in Finance Collective. “Anyone who is there early days, CEO, CTO, head of ops, is grappling with the same fires and the same excitement,” she says.

What’s Next for the AI Finance Startup Tabs

Tabs is now investing aggressively in engineering, sales, and marketing, with a dedicated AI team and a new SoHo office featuring a “real AI lab.” Customers are already pushing for more. “We’re being asked every day for more platform technology to serve bigger and more robust companies,” she says.

As the conversation comes to a close, Schwartz smiles when I ask about how she thinks and leads an through hype. “Everyone’s excited about AI,” she says. “But the real magic is execution. If we shorten the path from invoice to cash, we’re not chasing hype. We’re changing how money moves.”

It is clear that in a world obsessed with what’s next, Rebecca Schwartz is focused on what works.