After scaling six startups, four of which had exits, and spending years mentoring early-stage founders, veteran Raleigh entrepreneur Oz Merchant is not even close to being done building solutions.
Merchant’s seventh startup is Futureproof, an AI finance ERP platform that was built to fill a gap most early-stage companies struggle with: finding a comprehensive financial management system. He said that in his years working with founders, he’s noticed that “most founders don’t understand finance.”
He continued, “At some point in the journey, you have to have some kind of CFO, somebody that’s keeping an eye on the finances, and most founders don’t know how to do a bottoms-up forecasting model pro forma.”
In the effort to keep up with the AI boom, he theorized there could be something in the agentic space to make the financial journey smoother and help founders figure out what they need, especially if they’re in the e-commerce or SaaS space. After interviewing over 50 startups, Merchant realized that most founders had particular headaches using solutions like QuickBooks.
“People’s data are just sitting on top of a QuickBooks or other platforms,” he explained. “We decided to take in all the raw source data from the banks, from the credit cards, marketplaces, stripes, and build the general ledger ourselves.”
How the platform works
Futureproof’s ledgers are built from the ground up, making it not only specific to early-stage SaaS and e-commerce companies but also consolidating every financial aspect into one platform to make the information easily accessible.
“If the source of your data that you’re sitting on top of is not accurate, then everything you’re building on top of that is going to be tainted,” Merchant said. “So, building the general ledger ourselves gave us the core and the truth of what’s happening inside the business and that we are doing it accurately.”
Futureproof comes equipped with six AI agents that have their own tasks and can keep track of your ledgers even when you’re off the clock:
- Vic — The bookkeeper who categorizes transactions, reconciles accounts, and delivers real-time financial statements:
- Remi — the AR specialist who tracks receivables and manages collections.
- Theo — the AP specialist who ensures you pay your bills on time and who handles international wires.
- Hugo — the RevOps Analyst that watches your MRR, ARR, cohort retention, and unit economics.
- Margo — the finance analyst who can build forecasts and model runways with hiring and fundraising plans.
- Nia — the investor manager that can manage the cap table, SAFE conversions, dilution scenarios, and investor data room for the next raise or M&A exit.
The platform currently markets toward e-commerce and SaaS companies, as Merchant noted that these are high-growth spaces that are more complex than main street accounting.
“SaaS has revenue recognition that needs to be factored in, and e-commerce has tons of complexities around inventory. Especially with e-commerce, you’ve got international stuff coming in, so tariffs, customs, a lot more that has to be factored in,” he explained.
The journey so far
Futureproof was initially envisioned as one AI CFO that could do all the finance stuff. But Merchant and his team of five realized that this executive role is too important to be fully agentic. The pivot was toward six agents doing individualized aspects of financial work, supporting (rather than replacing) a CFO by doing the job(s) a whole finance department might otherwise be tasked with.
“When you look at the platform, it’s not just replacing QuickBooks,” he said. “It replaces a lot of different things in that journey from contract management revenue, fundraising. We do the cap table modeling and the data room as well.”
Futureproof came to market over the summer, and the SaaS version released this fall month, with the e-commerce version having just rolled out in advance of this writing. Since coming to market, Merchant said they have already onboarded just under a dozen customers—some still in beta, some paying.
QUICK BITS
Startup: Futureproof
Founder: Oz Merchant
Founded: 2025
Team size: 6
Location: Raleigh
Website: runfutureproof.com
Even though this is his seventh startup, Merchant said Futureproof is the first solution he’s sold to other founders. He explained, “It’s kind of personal this time around because we’re, as they say, eating our own dog food. We are customer zero on the platform.”
He continued, “The whole goal is to sell this to other people because I’ve been through the journey… The biggest issue for most founders is having enough cash flow to have their dream, their vision come to fruition. [Futureproof] helps with that visibility to understand what your runway is, what your cash position is.”
That’s why Merchant was proud to add that Futureproof has now added some funding partners into the platform, so founders can access non-dilutive capital through the platform too.
“Whether you’re a SaaS company or e-commerce, you also have access to capital depending on kind of the performance of your business,” he said.
Merchant is open to hearing from founders in these spaces to get them a trial or onboarded onto their platform.
