cfo.ai Launches an AI CFO Built for Founders

Ari connects to a company's systems to build financial models, forecast cash, run scenarios and proactively investigate what founders need to know

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 10, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- cfo.ai (formerly Runway) today launched an AI CFO that gives founders an always-on finance partner for understanding and running their business. Called Ari, it connects to a company's financial systems, builds and maintains a live model of the business and works alongside founders 24/7. Unlike a chatbot that waits for a question, Ari continuously monitors the business, investigates meaningful changes and brings them to the founder's attention.

"LLMs can already handle a lot of the simpler work in finance, including accounting and reporting, but they still struggle with forecasting," said Siqi Chen, Founder and CEO of cfo.ai. "The problem is structural. Spreadsheets were designed around how humans see and work, not how LLMs work. We built cfo.ai so founders can put AI to work on the financial questions that require a real model of the business."

An AI CFO that runs the numbers 24/7

Ari connects directly to the systems where a company's financial and operating data already lives, including NetSuite, QuickBooks, Rippling, ADP, Mercury, Brex, Stripe, Salesforce, Snowflake, Google Sheets and Excel. From those systems, Ari builds a financial model of the business and keeps it updated as the underlying data changes.

Founders can ask Ari the kinds of questions they would normally take to a finance leader. Ari can forecast cash, analyze a hiring plan, explain a variance, prepare a board update or model the financial impact of a decision before the company makes it.

For example, a founder could ask what happens to ending cash if sales and marketing hiring slips by a quarter. Ari can identify the relevant hiring assumptions, trace how they flow through operating expenses and cash, and model the impact across future quarters. The founder can then ask Ari to hold enterprise hiring as well, change another assumption or explore a different scenario.

The work remains available after Ari answers the question. Founders can inspect the model Ari built, change assumptions themselves and continue exploring it without having to start another conversation. Ari works from that same model, so changes made by the founder become part of the context for what it does next.

Ari also works proactively, without waiting for a founder to ask a question. As new data enters the business, it continuously keeps track of metrics such as ARR, cash, EBITDA and churn, identifies meaningful changes and investigates what caused them. If cash is running below plan, churn jumps in a customer segment or hiring starts moving ahead of forecast, Ari can trace the underlying drivers and bring the issue to the founder's attention.

"A chatbot waits for you to ask it something, but that's not how a CFO works," said Chen. "A CFO keeps track of the business, notices when something changes, figures out why and brings it to you. Ari works the same way, while giving founders direct access to the model so they can understand what's happening and keep digging into the numbers themselves."

Reambase gives AI a spreadsheet built for how agents work

Underneath Ari is Reambase, cfo.ai's multidimensional calculation engine built specifically for AI agents.

Spreadsheets have served as the default environment for financial modeling for decades because they are visual, flexible and easy for people to manipulate. Those same qualities make them difficult for AI agents. In a traditional spreadsheet, meaning often depends on position. A person can look at a grid and immediately understand that one row represents revenue, one column represents January and twelve formulas copied across a row represent the same calculation over time.

An AI agent has to reconstruct that meaning from individual cells, coordinates, labels and formulas. The same business logic can appear as hundreds of different cell references across a workbook, consuming context as the agent repeatedly reconstructs relationships a person understands visually.

Reambase represents the business differently. Instead of relying primarily on coordinates such as B7 or G12, it gives values business addresses built from named variables and dimensions. Revenue, for example, can exist across Customer, Product, Region, Month and Scenario. Salary can belong to a particular Employee, Department and Month. Meaning travels with the value rather than depending on where it appears in a grid.

That structure lets Ari work directly with the business concepts involved in a financial question while Reambase handles formulas, dependencies and recalculation underneath. A model can contain as many dimensions as the business requires while founders can still see and manipulate the result through familiar tables and financial models.

About cfo.ai

cfo.ai builds AI-powered financial tools for founders. Its AI CFO, Ari, connects to a company's systems to build financial models, forecast cash, run scenarios and proactively surface what founders need to know. For more information, visit cfo.ai.

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SOURCE cfo.ai