What investors actually look for in your finance function, pre-seed to Series C

These days the lines between Seed, Series A and Series B are blurred, but as a rule of thumb:

Seed: Finance is survival hygiene. Do you know your burn, your runway to the month, and can you close the books without heroics? Usually a founder plus a bookkeeper plus maybe a fractional CFO at most. The bar is accuracy and cash control, nothing fancier.

Series A: Finance becomes a planning function. You need a real operating model that ties spend to a plan, unit economics you actually understand (CAC, payback, gross margin, cohort retention), and a budget the team is run against. First full-time finance hire lands here, often a strong Finance lead or VP. You do not yet need a CFO.

Series B: Finance becomes a decision-support engine. Forecast accuracy matters, headcount planning is rigorous, you are segmenting the P&L by product, region and cohort, and you can answer 'what happens if we do X.' Systems replace spreadsheets. This is where a genuine CFO usually earns their seat.

Series C+: Finance becomes strategic and capital-markets-facing. Capital allocation, M&A readiness, audit-grade reporting, the beginnings of an IPO-ready control environment, and treasury and FX as real disciplines.

Pre-seed, nobody expects a finance function. What I am looking for is basic clarity: do you know your burn, your runway, and the one or two metrics that prove the idea is working? A founder with a clean spreadsheet and a grip on their unit economics is ahead of 80% of the field.

Seed is where things start to matter. Clean books (Xero, not a shoebox), a basic forecasting model, and a monthly pulse on what the money is actually doing.

Series A is the first real jump. Investors are now running proper due diligence. If you cannot explain your CAC payback period or why your gross margins look the way they do, that is a problem. At A, 'I'll get back to you on that' lands differently than it does at pre-seed.

Pre-seed to seed, it is just the founders plus a couple of engineers and one or two go-to-market hires. There is effectively no finance function. Levelling up to Series A or B is where you get your first finance hire, and finding the right talent is critical, particularly if you are an Australian business looking to expand into the US or Europe. Cash management becomes more sophisticated, forecasting becomes more precise, and the operational side kicks in with payroll and the finance tech stack. At the bare minimum: Xero, payroll, accounting, and general financial reporting hygiene.

Timeliness and turnaround on financial reporting is a really easy signal for us as investors. Within one day is exceptional. Within a couple of days is green. A couple of weeks is yellow. More than a quarter is a red flag.

In the earliest stages the finance function usually sits with the founder, with outsourced accounting to meet regulatory needs. As a startup moves through the stages, the complexity of revenue tends to increase: multiple currencies, usage-based and AI token pricing, different customer types. Once managing that stops being the best use of a founder's time, or it becomes a lever for growth rather than a compliance task, it makes sense to bring in a fractional CFO and eventually a finance function.

Where founders do not keep pace is when complexity arrives in the customer base and they are not seeing the granularity. They cannot identify who their most valuable customers are, where the churn points sit, or when a customer is actually costing them money. And that granularity has to be captured as you go, not calculated later, as it can help drive strategy.

We predominantly invest at Seed to Series A, where the CEO, founder or co-founder should typically be their own sales and finance person, across pipeline and cash flow. We most often see companies getting behind post-Series A, where they need the right team in place to go from product-market fit to scale, while keeping a keen eye on runway. That is where the value shifts to a dedicated finance professional, so the CEO can stay focused on sales.

Team challenges (right people in right roles, with an inclusive culture) and lack of working capital are what most often kill companies, so strong internal controls are critical.

The classic gap is Series B revenue on Series A finance infrastructure. A business scaling fast but still run out of a founder's spreadsheet, with no one who can produce a defensible forecast. The tells: books that take three weeks to close, a forecast that is never within 15% of actuals, no ownership of the model below the CEO, and a data room that has to be built from scratch when the round starts. The company is usually 6 to 12 months late hiring, and it shows up as a chaotic raise.

Companies are always exactly one stage behind. A seed company delays the financial model until Series A prep, then scrambles. The ones that get ahead build the infrastructure slightly before they need it, not to impress investors, but because it makes them better operators.

When finance is taking more than 20% of your time as CEO and you are not learning anything from it anymore, it is time to hire. Most founders hold on too long. They feel like letting go means losing control. But staying in the weeds of reconciliations and payroll is genuinely one of the most expensive things you can do. Your job is to allocate capital, not count it.

The trigger I watch for is not revenue. It is the point where the founder is the only person who can answer a question about the numbers, or worse, where they are not giving finance enough time to understand the startup's true position. Either way, decisions start slowing down, or they get made on bad data.

The right time is when the finance function starts to outgrow what the CEO, founder or co-founder can manage alongside sales, before it becomes a distraction from growth. This is typically the period between Series A and Series B. Ideally, the team brings on a finance leader who takes over the whole function from the start, in a part-time role.

Most founders over-hire the title and under-hire the substance. At Series A you rarely need a CFO. You need a hands-on VP Finance or senior finance lead who will build the model, close the books, and own the raise. Hire the CFO when the job is genuinely strategic and you can keep one busy.

A lot of founders default to the Big 4 background because it sounds impressive. But someone who has only worked in a Big 4 environment has often never operated in a 20-person company with a founder still changing the product strategy every six weeks. What you usually need first is a great Controller or Finance Manager, not a $300k CFO.

Series A is typically when you would see the first finance hire. Team size will be around 20-plus by then. What we usually see is a still-operationally-facing founder who delegates the finance responsibilities to a head of finance or finance lead. The founder keeps running operations, but the finance function specifically gets handed over.

A good sign is when investors can speak to the head of finance and they are across the specifics on anything financial related, including investor reporting, without needing to loop in the founder. That is my proxy test for whether the handover has been done properly. The reverse is that they need to refer to the founder for everything, or worse, they make inaccurate statements because they are not across the detail.

A good handover means the new finance leader respects the existing process and modelling, and builds from there rather than bringing in an entirely new approach. The CEO still needs to be 100% on top of the numbers, and too much change too fast can leave them feeling out of control. A bad handover looks like a completely different forecasting approach introduced immediately, where the CEO can end up unable to confidently pitch their own numbers to investors, having lost the thread on how the forecast actually works.

Three months of real overlap, not a two-week sprint. The founder documents everything informal: who the accountant is, what the weird holding structure was, why that deferred revenue is sitting where it is. KPIs agreed upfront so the new person can report against them from day one. The founder stays close enough to sanity-check the numbers without actually doing the work.

The founder 'delegates' finance but keeps a shadow model, second-guesses every forecast, and stays the single point of truth. Or the opposite. A clean-break dump with no context, so the new hire spends three months reverse-engineering how the business actually makes money and rebuilds trust from zero. The tell that it went well: within two board cycles, the finance leader, not the founder, is the one the board turns to for the numbers, and the founder has visibly bought back time for product and customers.

Once a finance leader is in, the founder should absolutely be able to step out of the detail. But separate the detail from the drivers. Instinctively knowing the impact of an extra hire or a change to the pricing plan is what lets you make those calls with confidence, and quickly, and that matters when you are moving at pace. It is less a handover than a shift into better collaboration across the business, led by the finance function.

The finance function tells a story. Every number is a signal about how you run your business. Investors are not just checking whether the P&L adds up. They are reading your finance function as a diagnostic. Messy books mean unclear thinking. If your accounts are a disaster, we assume your operations are too. Clean financials are not a box-ticking exercise, they are a proxy for how seriously you take execution.

The raise starts 6 to 12 months before the term sheet. The forecast you will be judged against in diligence is the one you are building now. Investors will pull up the plan you set 12 months ago and check whether you hit it. Credibility is earned in the quarters before the round, not in the pitch.

Get your finance function in order before you kick off a raise. That means the financial statements, but also the forecast, the data room, the cap table, including the SAFE conversion mechanisms. Where founders fall through is where they last-minute pull in their finance person, and that person is not across the details. When investors ask for something and there are delays, that is a red flag.

In the early stages a model is still largely directional. What I am looking for when a founder is raising the next round is whether the assumptions make sense, and ideally whether there is evidence behind them, what milestones they need to hit before the next raise, and whether they have the resources, and the buffer, to get there. The next level is when a founder can show they understand the drivers of that growth and how they change over time, for example how the product roadmap layers over the model. If revenue just grows at 20% month on month with no explanation, that tells me the founder does not yet understand their levers for growth.

We predominantly invest at Seed to Series A, where cash is more important than profitability, and founders should be focused on milestones and runway. By Series B, I would expect a significant step change in the finance function. Modelling needs to include more complex growth assumptions, while also being more accurate. As the future of the company becomes more predictable, the finance leader plays an increasingly important role.

The biggest misconception I see is founders treating finance as something separate from strategy, a compliance task they will deal with after the pitch. But your numbers are the embodiment of your strategy. If you cannot explain them fluently, you cannot explain your business. And if you cannot explain your business, I cannot back you.

The bar for financial clarity is rising because the tools to achieve it are better than ever. Between AI-assisted analysis and modern finance tooling, there is genuinely no excuse now for a founder not to have a clean, up-to-date picture of their business before they walk into an investor meeting. The founders who lean into those tools early show up differently. That is the new minimum.

A good finance leader does not just survive the raise, they change the terms of it, because they let you walk in with a defensible story instead of a defensive one.