Ex-Microsoft Execs Unveil AI Startup to Challenge Excel Dominance

Maximor has emerged from stealth with $9 million in funding and an ambition to use AI agents that end finance teams’ dependence on Excel.

The startup was created by Ramnandan Krishnamurthy (CEO) and Ajay Krishna Amudan (CTO), who previously worked on revamping Microsoft’s internal revenue systems. Their Microsoft finance experience helped attract angel investors including CFOs and finance leaders from Ramp, Gusto, MongoDB, Zuora, and the Big Four accounting firms.

The seed round also drew Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas and Zuora CEO Tien Tzuo, with institutional investors Gaia Ventures and Boldcap participating.

“Every month, finance teams spend nights and weekends pulling data from fragmented systems, reconciling accounts, parsing contracts, and building reports — all by hand. ERP migrations promise transformation but still leave teams stuck in spreadsheets, chasing the close. Finance leaders don’t want disruption. They want business-as-usual, just without the busywork,” Maximor said in its announcement.

“With this funding, we’re doubling down on product development across key controllership workflows. We’re expanding our engineering and AI research teams, and partnering with more finance leaders to prove that finance doesn’t need to be trapped in busywork,” it added.

Excel’s four-decade reign faces a challenge

Maximor targets companies with at least $50 million in revenue and supports both GAAP and IFRS standards for enterprises. With 18 employees split between New York and Bengaluru, the company is trying to capture this mid-market opportunity.

The startup’s platform integrates directly with the systems organizations already rely on, such as ERPs, CRMs, billing platforms, payroll solutions, and banks. Its agents automate manual and time-consuming financial tasks, including reconciling accounts and transactions, preparing and posting journal entries, parsing contracts to allocate revenue, managing close checklists and flux analysis, and delivering audit-ready reporting packages.

Rather than spending days assembling numbers and handling repetitive processes, finance teams can rely on AI to handle the preparation. Teams then focus only on reviewing exceptions, with the assurance that every output is fully traceable and ready for audits.

Naturally, Maximor reckons it has emerged with good timing.

The firm reckons three out of four accountants are approaching retirement age, while the pipeline of new CPAs has fallen by 30% over the past decade. At the same time, the complexity of finance is increasing with multi-entity operations, usage-based pricing models, and heightened audit scrutiny.

It believes relying on additional headcount to keep up is no longer sustainable. Maximor thinks automation is the answer, and one that can scale alongside finance leaders and their growing demands.

The startup may be right if we examine the bigger picture.

Four months ago, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella predicted that agents will replace all software, stating that traditional business applications will soon be replaced by intelligent agents. Meanwhile, data from last month shows companies are already saving $400 million per year using AI agents, with some seeing operational costs slashed by 35%.