He spent two decades inside finance, hating the spreadsheets. Then he built the tool that kills them.
// Julio Martinez: the man who looked at finance and decided 80% of it was busywork worth deleting.
// Dispatch
April 2020. Spain locks down. Julio Martinez, instead of bunkering, opens a laptop and starts paying two salaries out of his own savings - his and Jorge Lluch's. There is an MVP, no outside capital, and a pandemic flattening the global economy. Most people would call that bad timing. Martinez called it Abacum.
The bet was narrow and stubborn. Finance teams, he believed, were drowning. Not in numbers, in plumbing. Reconciling. Re-keying. Rebuilding the same model for the third time this quarter because someone changed an assumption on row 412. He had watched it happen from the inside for nearly twenty years, across banking desks and venture studios, and he was sick of watching.
So before writing a line of production code, he did the unglamorous thing. He talked to more than 100 finance leaders. The verdict was brutal and clarifying: up to 80% of their time went to manual work, not the strategic thinking they were hired for. There was the product. Not a chatbot bolted onto chaos - a platform that cleaned the chaos first.
Five years on, Abacum has raised north of $100 million, serves hundreds of mid-market companies in more than 30 countries, and runs out of New York, London and Barcelona with a team past 100. Not bad for a company born the same week the world stopped.
// By the numbers
Total raised for Abacum
Countries served
Finance leaders interviewed first
Founded, week one of lockdown
Cities: NY, London, Barcelona
Of finance time lost to manual work
Finance is a trust business. You cannot put intelligence on top of chaos and expect credibility.- Julio Martinez, on why AI in finance starts at the bottom of the stack
// The long way around
Martinez did not take the straight road. He started as a corporate finance and M&A lawyer - learning to read the fine print before he learned to read the market. Then came Citigroup, and a passport that filled up fast: New York, Sao Paulo, Zurich, London. Capital markets, M&A, private equity. The kind of resume that teaches pattern recognition the hard way, deal by deal.
A mentor pitched him a co-founding seat at a fintech venture builder. He said no. Then he said yes - and called it discovering his calling. At InnoCells, Banco Sabadell's corporate venturing arm, he launched four fintech startups across Europe, the Americas and Asia. Four shots on goal. Enough to learn what a real opportunity looks like, and what a distraction looks like dressed up as one.
The thread running through all of it: he and Jorge Lluch had lived the same scar tissue in different buildings. Finance teams always a step behind the business, always returning with the answer after the decision window had slammed shut. Abacum is the product they wished someone had handed them years ago. Nobody did. So they built it.
He attended Y Combinator in his 40s, which he likes to point out as proof that the age you start is mostly a story you tell yourself. His operating creed is borrowed from a football coach, Bill Walsh: master the inputs and the outcomes take care of themselves.
// Receipts
Corporate finance and M&A law. He learns to distrust assumptions before he ever builds a model on top of one.
New York, Sao Paulo, Zurich, London. Capital markets, M&A, private equity. Pattern recognition, acquired deal by deal.
Co-founds and scales the bank's venture arm. Ships four fintech startups across Europe, the Americas and Asia.
Founded the first week of Spain's lockdown with Jorge Lluch. Self-funded salaries, an MVP, and a Y Combinator acceptance.
Series B closes. Total funding crosses nine figures. The US expansion accelerates.
// The thesis, in one chart
Martinez's customer research surfaced an uncomfortable ratio. Abacum's whole pitch is flipping it. Illustrative, drawn from his stated "up to 80% manual work" finding.
// Abacum's job: automate the gray, hand back the teal.
// How he thinks about AI
Most finance AI tackles the end of the workflow. Martinez aims at the beginning - cleaning, reconciliation, classification, anomaly detection. The boring base, where humans add the least value and make the most errors.
A forecast you cannot explain is worthless to a CFO. So governance lives inside the workflow: assumptions visible, logic traceable. No black boxes pretending to be oracles.
Capital allocation, hiring, pricing - the high-stakes calls remain people's work. The machine clears the runway; the human still flies the plane.
Finance is losing influence not because the analysis was wrong, but because it arrived too late.- Julio Martinez, on why he built for speed
// Margin notes
Before product-market fit there was a clipboard. 100-plus finance leaders, interviewed by the book. "I'm very rigorous about going by the book and trying to do customer research as it's supposed to be done."
His favorite line - "slow is smooth, smooth is fast" - is a quiet rebuke to the move-fast-break-things crowd. He builds Abacum deliberately, on purpose.
Everyone chased enterprise logos. Martinez read the same research and went the other way, to where the pain was acute and the attention wasn't.
He walked into Y Combinator at an age when many founders are told they've missed the window. He treats the window as fiction.
// The endgame
Make Abacum the uncontested FP&A category leader - and turn finance from a periodic reporting chore into a continuous decision-support engine. Repetitive work automated, human judgment concentrated on the calls that actually move a company.
// Watch & listen
// The directory