Clockwork

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Founder: Fady Hawatmeh
Founding: 2019
Mission: Empower businesses with the tools they need to succeed, built from a deep understanding of the challenges CFOs face
Employees: 10 & 50% Local
Workplace: In Office
Stage & Capital Raised: Seed & $5.5M raised
Investors: G20 Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Service Provider Capital, Underscore VC
Key Customers: CloudCPA, Reconciled, GeneralCents Accounting, gofigure accounting, withum
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): $15M – $45M (assuming average equity dilution in the $3M Seed fundraise)
^ this is a useless number from MGMT Boston. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!

Clockwork is building FP&A software for professionals, by professionals. This Seed stage startup is creating a platform for growing businesses who need access to powerful financial tools but didn’t have the resources or time to invest..until now. Because sometimes you just need to build the solution yourself.

Founder & CEO Fady Hawatmeh started his career at Boeing, working on FP&A (financial planning & analysis) and strategy for the aerospace giant. During his tenure he built a library of financial models for family, friends, and friends of friends back home in St. Louis. These were entrepreneurs short on time who were running restaurants (like his dad!), small businesses, and consulting firms who needed help with financial reporting & analysis.  

Fady’s models were good. Word spread. His “client” base grew. Eventually, he transitioned from the corporate world to build his own outsourced CFO consulting firm based on the demand of 100s of Excel spreadsheets building models on models for clients. Fady & his team scaled the firm to 8 employees and 100+ clients over 4 years. 

Their bootstrapped business became Clockwork, an FP&A software platform built for growing, resource constrained entrepreneurs because none of the other solutions in the market (now competitors) offered anything close to what was needed for small business owners. Clockwork’s competitive advantage is that their product roadmap is guided by CFOs for CFOs. Or, in Fady’s case, a recovering CFO!

The global financial planning software market is $4B+ growing to $18B by 2033 (src). This market view mostly represents enterprise level offerings who use legacy ERP systems and armies of analysts alongside software solutions to get their FP&A processes sorted. That doesn’t exactly work for small businesses who can’t afford the cost or complexity.

Clockwork is democratizing FP&A for the 30M+ small businesses in the U.S. (src) who need better tools to scale their operations so they can spend more time with customers. Outsourced CFOs charge $5,000+ per month to build financial models. Fady would know! When he finally wound down his CFO business to build Clockwork he was only taking on clients who could afford $20,000+ per month minimums. The maintenance of the work was too expensive to do for cheaper. And those models were static!

Clockwork is building a comprehensive software solution for planning, managing, and predicting cash flow & finances which integrates with payroll providers, benefits solutions, and accounting software like Quickbooks with the click of a button.

Whether it’s building formulas for different growth rates or getting better overall financial visibility, any company leader – primarily CEOs, COOs, and VPs of Operations – can navigate Clockwork for a fraction of the cost and time on their path to building a Digital CFO. They pull in 3 years of transactional data and can build 5 year financial models plus weekly cash flow forecasts in just 3 minutes.

Their customers range from professional service firms to growth stage SaaS startups to dental & medical offices. Their two pillars – ease of use & accuracy – are helping them become “the only FP&A platform people love to use” that expands with customers’ needs.

Clockwork’s GTM focus is on companies without CFOs as those roles tend to be the last executive role a company hires, often at $25M+ in revenue. It’s too expensive! And there’s often no reason for a full time resource much earlier. But in that preceding period, business owners have very little visibility due to the manual limitations of spreadsheets for various cash flow, finance, and accounting views.

To further the fulfillment of empowering businesses with the tools they need to succeed, Clockwork will be adding conversational AI tools into their platform in 2025. These roadmap initiatives will enable leaders to use prompts to elicit data and analysis. Over time they aspire to give users the ability to build full financial models with prompts and enable “smart alerts” that will flag certain trends and even use industry benchmarking data to guide actions. How helpful would it be to understand your margins are above or below comparable businesses? Or how about 3 subsequent ideas to improve your margin profile? Even better!

Peter Zotto, the former Co-Founder & CRO of Profitwell, has joined Clockwork as COO to help fine tune their foundational operations to scale. Having the addition of a COO who has “been there and done that” with a playbook that aligns well with Fady’s vision should help the team accelerate into 2025.

Clockwork already has thousands of users on the platform and doubled their revenue growth each quarter in 2024 without adding headcount. All of their growth has been super efficient as one might expect being led by a former CFO!

In addition to their conversational AI roadmap items, they will be adding more CRM & banking integration partners. Their vision is to become the Workday for companies “you’ve never heard about” <$100M in revenue. The businesses holding up this economy. 

Fady recently moved the company to Boston from Chicago where all new hires will work in their Boston office. Their move to Boston is a move to help build a generational company with the surrounding talent and network to make it happen. We’re glad to have you building here, Fady & Clockwork team! 

Operators to Know:

My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Clockwork team I know I missed many up & coming operators internally

Key Roles To Be Hired:

If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:

  • What is the current ICP for Clockwork’s growing customer base?
  • What are the biggest challenges as you scale the team past 10 employees?
  • What is the long term vision for the company?
  • What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2025 // teams that need the most help?

We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Clockwork you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more business owners into the digital CFO age. All stewards of responsible capitalism applaud your efforts. See you around town!

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