Mary Antony knows the exact moment when a financial statement stops feeling like a report and starts feeling like a group project gone wrong. A number changes in a spreadsheet. The table in Word needs to move. The footnote needs the same update. The revised document travels through email, where another accountant checks the math, the formatting and every cross-reference. Then someone spots a different change, and the loop begins again.
She learned the ritual from the inside. Before becoming a software founder, Antony built a career in accounting and finance across PwC, Yelp, Flexport and Miro. The companies changed. Their stages changed. The underlying work kept returning in a familiar costume: disconnected files, repetitive checks, late revisions and highly trained people spending their attention on low-value mechanics.
The stakes made the inefficiency stranger. A marketing draft can tolerate a typo. A set of financial statements cannot casually lose a subtotal or let a disclosure drift out of sync. The document has to be right, and it has to show how it became right. For years, that requirement translated into more manual labor rather than better infrastructure.
“The way financial statements come together, it’s just patched together in a lot of spreadsheets, moved into a bunch of Word documents.”Mary Antony, describing the old workflow
The colleague from the hard days
At Flexport in 2018, Antony met Kelsey Gootnick, another accounting leader who understood the same machinery. Their later origin story is refreshingly short on founder mythology. They worked together. They dealt with pressure. Each watched how the other behaved when a deadline was close and the answer was unclear.
That history became useful evidence years later. Antony has said she chose to build with Gootnick because she had seen her persist through messy, exhausting problems. Gootnick, in turn, had watched Antony dive into difficult work without flinching. Their styles were complementary, and both cared about creating what they called an A-team environment.
The company grew from a relationship already tested by actual work. When Antony left Flexport for Miro and Gootnick moved on to other operating roles, they stayed in touch. They also kept finding the same reporting problems. In 2023 they returned to those accumulated frustrations and started Inscope.
Learning to tell a complicated story quickly
Antony, Gootnick and an early co-founder began working full time in July 2023. A month later they joined the first class of The Mint, the fintech accelerator run by Better Tomorrow Ventures. They were first-time founders, pre-product and pre-revenue. The accelerator offered structure at precisely the moment every early decision seemed consequential.
One small scene captures Antony's approach. When she sent Better Tomorrow co-founder Sheel Mohnot the blurb she used to request customer introductions, he walked over to her desk and offered to workshop it. The exchange was practical: a few sentences could decide whether a potential customer understood the problem well enough to take a meeting.
A rule she carries A manager once told Antony that a bigger role did not require every answer. It required knowing which questions to ask. Her version of the idea is to build a personal board of peers, mentors and specialists who have seen the problem before.
Demo Day required a different kind of compression. The founders rehearsed until they could fit the company into two or three minutes. Antony later called that ability a valuable founder skill. The audience included the investor who would lead the company's seed round. Storytelling did not replace operating knowledge. It made the knowledge portable.
Inscope launched in beta in early 2024, initially serving customers using Oracle NetSuite. Its first iteration automated GAAP and non-GAAP reporting, including the indirect cash flow statement. Antony describes that statement as a Sudoku puzzle solved through trial and error: one misplaced piece can disturb the whole structure. She likes puzzles. She does not believe an essential financial report should behave like one.
The useful part of AI is the boring part
Inscope's promise lives in details that software demos often skip. A financial table needs consistent dollar signs. Totals must foot and cross-foot. A figure changed in one location needs to change everywhere it appears. Disclosures must be complete. Reviewers need version history, blacklines and an audit trail that survives the final round of edits.
Antony has estimated that each turn of a draft can consume six to eight hours of a CPA's time just for ticking and tying. Formatting alone can take as much as a fifth of an accountant's time. Automation matters here because the tasks are simultaneously repetitive and unforgiving. Saving time is useful. Preserving confidence is the larger point.
This is where Antony's background becomes more than a line in a pitch. She can separate the irritating steps from the essential controls. A disclosure checklist may look like paperwork to an outsider, but it is evidence that a reporting team asked the required questions. A blackline is not decorative comparison; it is how a reviewer understands what changed. Good automation has to remove repetition while leaving those signals intact.
The same logic shapes how Inscope talks about artificial intelligence. General-purpose tools can draft fluent language, but finance teams also need internal consistency, repeatable calculations and an accountable trail. The product combines software rules with AI-assisted review inside the document workflow. That design asks a practical question before a futuristic one: what can the system do reliably today that frees a professional to inspect the exception, investigate the assumption or advise the business?
The first public financing arrived in June 2024: $4.3 million led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with Better Tomorrow and a group of finance and technology operators involved. Early customers included Pacvue and Curri. The team planned to expand the product, deepen its AI capabilities and grow its customer base.
By February 2026, the story had moved upmarket. Inscope announced a $14.5 million Series A led by Norwest, with Storm Ventures and existing investors Better Tomorrow and Lightspeed participating. The company said customers had grown more than fivefold over the prior year and annual recurring revenue more than thirtyfold. Several Top 100 accounting firms were onboarding, and users reported preparation cycles that were 60 percent faster.
Trust is part of the product
The funding is a milestone. The more interesting constraint is professional temperament. Antony describes accountants as risk-averse, a rational response when errors can carry legal, monetary and reputational consequences. Full automation cannot simply arrive with a confident chatbot voice. It has to earn adoption inside the review process.
That explains Inscope's emphasis on traceability. The platform is designed for both the enterprise producing a statement and the accounting firm reviewing it. Shared infrastructure can reduce handoffs without erasing responsibility. Every change still needs context. Every output still needs a path back to its inputs.
Antony's public writing follows a similar discipline. She is optimistic about AI, but her examples focus on real workflows. In one recent planning exercise, she provided an AI system with CRM pipeline data, transaction-level bank data and business context. In under thirty minutes it produced a linked ARR plan, profit-and-loss statement and cash forecast, work that previously took two or three weeks. The mechanics compressed. Assumptions, review and judgment remained.
“Accurate and transparent financial reporting is what allows U.S. capital markets to function.”Mary Antony, February 2026
That distinction points toward her larger ambition. Inscope is building toward complete financial reports generated at the speed of business, including statements, footnotes and required disclosures. The goal is not speed detached from accountability. It is a reporting system where accuracy, collaboration and change control reinforce one another.
The company now includes Jared Tibshraeny as co-founder and CTO, with a growing engineering and go-to-market team. The Series A is earmarked for both, along with support for increasingly complex reporting across large organizations. The original thesis remains legible beneath the expansion: expert attention should go to expert decisions.
What the accountant keeps
Antony's career has moved from checking companies' work to leading their finance teams to building the system around the work. Each step widened the frame. A precise accountant catches the discrepancy. A controller asks why the process produced it. A founder asks whether the process should exist in its current form.
Her founder advice is similarly grounded. Engineering talent matters. Early believers matter. Four ideas out of five may fail when they meet real users. Rejection is data. Small wins deserve deliberate celebration because momentum is a resource. These are observations from operating, not slogans floating above it.
The old financial reporting relay survives because every participant is trying to protect the final number. Inscope's bet is that the protection can move into the system itself. If it works, the accountant at the end of the process still owns the judgment. She simply spends less of the night moving the same number between documents.