On-Trend | Forecastr

Almost every early company I’ve ever seen runs on the same hidden artifact: a financial model living in one giant spreadsheet, built by the founder at midnight, held together by formulas only that founder understands. It’s the document the whole business steers by. It’s also the one nobody else can open without breaking something.

That’s a legacy process hiding in plain sight, and it’s why we backed Forecastr.

The model nobody trusts

For decades, getting a real financial model meant one of two things. You taught yourself enough Excel to be dangerous, or you paid a consultant a few thousand dollars to hand you a static file that was out of date the day you got it. Neither one gives a founder what they actually need, which is a living view of revenue, runway, and what happens to both if the next quarter goes sideways.

Forecastr, based in Louisville, turned that into software. Founders connect their actuals, build a model that updates itself, and walk into a board meeting or an investor pitch with numbers they can defend. The company’s stated goal is to become the default FP&A platform for the private market. The honest description is they’re replacing the spreadsheet, and the late nights that come with it.

This is the kind of category venture coverage tends to wave past, because financial modeling sounds like plumbing. But plumbing is exactly where durable software gets built. Every founder needs this. Almost none of them enjoy doing it themselves.

Why this fits the corridor

Forecastr sits in Louisville, which matters more than it looks. A lot of what they sell against isn’t a competitor, it’s inertia: the founder who figures they’ll just keep wrestling the spreadsheet for one more raise. Selling against a habit takes a team that understands operators who count every dollar, because that’s the world they come from too.

That’s the corridor. Founders here grew up building capital-efficient companies because nobody was funding them on a story. A tool that helps a founder see their runway clearly, a quarter before they need to, sells itself to people who think that way. Forecastr was built by that kind of founder, for that kind of founder.

What we look for, and what we saw here

We invest in disruptors of legacy industries and archaic models. The archaic model here is the artisanal, one-off, rebuild-it-every-time financial forecast. Forecastr productized it.

When we wrote our check we saw what we look for at our stage. Real customers paying real money for a tool they came back to every month, not once a year at fundraising time. Margins that got better as the product did more of the work. A team close enough to the problem to know exactly which corners founders were cutting, and why. Not a deck story. A business.

We backed Forecastr early, well before this was the obvious call. That read keeps looking better. Their most recent round brought in Chartline Capital Partners, a B2B venture firm with ties to Capital One, the kind of investor who shows up once a company has proven the model. We don’t treat any single financing round as proof of much on its own. We treat it as the rest of the market catching up to a thesis we already had.

The board work

When we lead or join a round, we take an active board seat. Triet Nguyen and I split that work, and it doesn’t change from one company to the next. Customers, capital, and talent. We open doors to buyers we know in the corridor. We make sure the next round of capital doesn’t require a move to the coast. We help build a team that wants to stay and build something here.

There are 21 companies in the portfolio. Forecastr is a clean example of why we built Render the way we did. A corridor team took a chore every founder hates, one the rest of venture had written off as too unglamorous to matter, and turned it into software people actually keep paying for.

If you’re building something like that, send us your deck. We read every one.