In the spring of 2020, most of New York was indoors and most spreadsheets were a mess. Albert Gozzi was sitting in his apartment with both. He had spent a career inside corporate finance - a finance seat at Procter & Gamble, a consulting stint at Bain, and eventually the CFO chair at an early-stage startup - and every finance tool he touched left him with the same complaint.
"Everything was either super old school and clunky, or tried to pull you out of Excel," he would later say. It is a small sentence with a big idea buried inside it. Software companies had spent two decades trying to replace the spreadsheet, and finance teams had spent two decades ignoring them - opening the fancy new tool, doing the real work in Excel, and pasting the answers back in. The behavior refused to die. Gozzi decided to build for the behavior instead of against it.
01 / The ideaA tool that lives where finance already works
The question that started Aleph was almost embarrassingly plain: what would a spreadsheet-first FP&A platform look like? Not a replacement for Excel and Google Sheets, but a layer underneath them - one that pipes live company data straight into the cells finance people already trust, and lets the results flow back out again. No consultants. No six-month rollout. No learning curve to speak of.
FP&A - financial planning and analysis - is the unglamorous engine room of a company. It is the budgeting, the forecasting, the monthly variance reports, the quiet work of explaining why a number moved. It is also, historically, a swamp of manual copy-paste. Gozzi's pitch was that most of that manual work could disappear if the data just showed up where people were already looking.
He built the first version as a personal project, then found his co-founder in Santiago Perez De Rosso, who became CTO. Between them they had the pedigree finance-software buyers like to see - Stanford and MIT, time at Google, Microsoft, DocuSign, and Bain - and, more usefully, the shared conviction that the spreadsheet was a feature, not a bug.
02 / The nameA point that contains every other point
The company is named after "The Aleph," a 1945 short story by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. In it, the Aleph is a single point in space that contains all other points - stand in the right spot and you can see everything at once, from every angle, without distortion. For a fellow Argentine building a tool meant to ingest a company's entire data footprint and hand finance teams a 360-degree view across past, present, and future, the metaphor did most of the marketing on its own.
Gozzi grew up in Argentina and trained as an industrial engineer at Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires before Stanford. Industrial engineering is essentially the study of making messy processes efficient - which is, more or less, what he pointed at corporate finance.
03 / The grindSeventy-five no's, one yes
Aleph came out of stealth in October 2023 with $16.7M in funding, including a Series A led by Bain Capital Ventures with Khosla Ventures and Y Combinator along for the ride. The tidy version of the story ends there. The real version has a harder middle.
Ahead of the next round, Gozzi collected 75 investor no's. Seventy-five. Most founders stop being able to count somewhere in the twenties. He kept a different scoreboard - reframing each rejection as information rather than verdict, and letting the one thing he could not fake do the talking: customer results. "The advocacy and outcomes they generate with Aleph are what truly drive investor conviction," he said. In 2025 the yes finally came, in the form of a $29M Series B led by Khosla Ventures, with Picus Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, and Y Combinator all following on. Total funding reached roughly $47M.
Between the Series A and the Series B, the business grew roughly 10X. Aleph's customers now include Zapier and Turo, and the target market has widened from PE- and VC-backed mid-market companies toward pre-IPO enterprises, public companies, and the advisory firms and funds that live in finance data all day.
04 / The betShow the work
Aleph calls itself AI-native, which in 2026 is close to table stakes. Gozzi's version has a specific flavor: observable AI over black-box automation. In finance, a wrong number is worse than a slow one, so the argument is that every AI output should be verifiable - you should be able to see how the model got there before you trust the figure in a board deck. Trust, in his telling, is a product feature rather than a slogan.
The rest of the philosophy is about friction. Free trials run on the customer's own data. Contracts are annual, with no implementation fees, because implementation is measured in hours. Remove the reasons not to adopt, and adoption stops being a sales problem.
05 / The personOff the clock
Aleph is a fully remote, self-described world-class team, which means the CEO does not have an office to disappear into. When Gozzi is not working, he runs - year-round, weather notwithstanding - and favors the Williamsburg waterfront at Domino Park. On weekends there is a decent chance he is at Smorgasburg. It is a small, specific set of habits, and small, specific habits tend to be who great companies are actually built by: people obsessed enough with one narrow annoyance to spend a decade removing it.
The narrow annoyance, in his case, was copy-paste. The company he built to kill it is now named after a point from which you can see everything. That is either a very grand ambition dressed in a very boring problem, or the other way around. Gozzi seems comfortable with both readings.
An Argentine engineer who noticed that finance teams never really left the spreadsheet - and built the tool that finally met them there.