The model marketplace revolution
In a candid conversation, Novi's founding team reveals why they're betting everything on a marketplace of ready-to-deploy financial models, and why this changes everything for finance teams drowning in complexity.
It's 9 PM in Warsaw, and we are enjoying our morning cappuccino with Novi's founding team in a lovely Warsaw cafe. They look tired but energized, the telltale signs of a startup in stealth mode about to reveal something big. What they're about to tell me challenges everything I thought I knew about the FP&A software market.
Journalist: You've been quietly building Novi for months now. The market is crowded with FP&A tools: Anaplan, Pigment, OneStream. What makes you think there's room for another player?
Novi founders: "Let me be blunt. Every single one of those tools you mentioned requires an army of consultants to implement. I've been a CFO. I've signed those seven-figure checks for implementations that take 18 months. And you know what happens after the consultants leave? The finance team can't change anything. They're held hostage by their own software."
"We're not building another FP&A platform. We're building the first FP&A marketplace that actually delivers immediate business value. Imagine downloading a fully-functional SaaS metrics model that you can customize yourself, today, not in six months."
The marketplace thesis: models as products
This is where the conversation gets interesting. While competitors focus on features and functionality, Novi is betting on something radically different: pre-built, industry-specific models that solve real pain points out of the box.
Journalist: Walk me through this marketplace concept. How is it different from template libraries that already exist?
Novi founders: "Templates are starting points. Our marketplace offers complete, production-ready models. Let me give you a concrete example."
"Last week, I was talking to a startup CFO who spent three weeks building a runway model in Excel. Three weeks! On our marketplace, they'll find a 'Startup Runway & Burn Rate Forecaster' that models multiple scenarios, handles complex equity waterfalls, and calculates their exact cash-out date. It's not a template. It's a fully operational model they can populate with their data in minutes."
"But here's the key difference: they can modify it themselves. No SQL. No proprietary scripting language. No consultants. Just our three building blocks: Dictionaries, Tables, and Links. It's genuinely finance-owned."
13-Week Cash Flow Forecast (Direct Method)
The single most critical tool for any company in a cash crunch. Every dollar in, every dollar out, tactical and ground-level.
SaaS Metrics Command Center
Full revenue waterfall, LTV:CAC by channel, cohort retention curves, and the Magic Number, board-ready in minutes.
EU CSRD Carbon Footprint Calculator
Mandatory compliance for 2025. Models Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions. Regulatory peace of mind, delivered.
Agency Profitability X-Ray
Breaks down profitability by Client, Project, and Employee. Immediately flags unprofitable clients and underutilized staff.
Simplicity as power
Journalist: You're making bold claims about simplicity. But can simple tools really handle the complexity of modern business?
Novi founders: "That's exactly the paradox we're solving. Complex tools don't handle complexity better. They add to it. Look at IBM Planning Analytics with their 'feeders' concept. Even their own consultants struggle to explain it."
"Our three building blocks (Dictionaries, Tables, and Links) can model anything you can model in Anaplan or Tagetik. But here's the difference: a finance analyst can understand it in an afternoon, not after a six-month certification program."
"The technology is sophisticated. The user experience is simple. That's not a compromise. It's the entire point."
"We're not selling software. We're selling solved problems."
The Polish advantage
There's another angle to this story that's worth noting. Novi is being built in Warsaw, positioning itself at the intersection of Eastern Europe's tech talent and Western Europe's enterprise market.
Journalist: You're building this from Poland. How does that influence your approach?
Novi founders: "Poland has incredible technical talent and a growing ecosystem of companies that need sophisticated FP&A tools but can't afford million-dollar implementations. We're building for them first, companies that need enterprise-grade capabilities at SMB prices."
"But more importantly, we understand the pain of currency risk, multi-entity consolidation, and EU compliance because we live it every day. That's why our marketplace will have models specifically for European regulatory requirements, FX hedging, and cross-border operations."
Partners, not competitors
Journalist: How do you plan to compete with vendors who have thousands of consultants in their ecosystem?
Novi founders: "We don't compete with consultants. We empower them. Think about it: a consultant using Novi can deliver a working model on day one of an engagement, not month six. They can focus on strategy and business logic, not technical implementation."
"We're offering implementation partners higher margins and happier clients. A three-month Anaplan implementation becomes a three-week Novi deployment. The consultant makes the same margin in a quarter of the time. That's a compelling proposition."
The FP&A tools market is expected to reach $11.8 billion by 2027, growing at 11.2% CAGR. But here's what the analysts miss: 67% of implementations fail to meet their original objectives, and 78% of finance teams still default to Excel for critical models.
Novi isn't trying to capture the entire market. They're targeting the gap between Excel and enterprise EPM, a space worth an estimated $3.2 billion that's currently underserved.
The finance team's perspective
Journalist: You've all been in finance roles. What's the one thing current tools get wrong?
Novi founders: "They forget who actually uses these tools day-to-day. It's not IT. It's not even FP&A managers. It's analysts who are drowning in Excel, working until midnight to update board decks."
"These analysts don't have time to learn SQL or attend Anaplan certification. They need tools that work like Excel but scale like enterprise software. They need to own their models, not be dependent on IT tickets to change a formula."
"When we say 'finance-owned,' we mean it literally. No black boxes. No proprietary languages. Just transparent, modifiable business logic that any Excel user can understand."
What's next
Journalist: You're 6-12 months from launch. What are the key milestones?
Novi founders: "We're laser-focused on three things. First, building out the marketplace with 50 production-ready models across ten industries. Second, ensuring our three-building-block paradigm can handle any model our beta users throw at it. Third, proving that finance teams can actually modify these models without training."
"We're not trying to boil the ocean. We're building the painkiller for very specific, very acute pain points. Each model in our marketplace represents hundreds of hours of finance team suffering that we're eliminating."
After two hours of conversation, one thing is crystal clear: Novi isn't trying to build a better FP&A platform. They're building a different category entirely: a marketplace where financial models are products, not projects.
The thesis is compelling. While competitors chase feature parity and enterprise logos, Novi is solving the unglamorous but universal problem every finance team faces: the gap between what they need to model and what they can actually build.
If they can deliver on their promise (production-ready models that finance teams can own and modify without consultants), they won't just capture market share. They'll create a new market entirely.
The FP&A tools market doesn't need another platform. It needs what Novi is building: a painkiller for the very real pain of financial modeling. And with enterprises spending an average of $2.3 million annually on FP&A tool implementations that fail more often than succeed, the timing couldn't be better.
As our conversation ends, the founders leave me with a thought that perfectly encapsulates their approach: "Every other vendor is selling the promise of capability. We're selling completed work. That's the difference between a tool and a solution."
In a market drowning in complexity, that simplicity might just be revolutionary.
Want to help build it?
Novi is being built in the open. Join early access to follow the work, and to shape the platform while it's still taking shape.