"The biggest thing that's going to kill a startup is not competition. It's probably that your idea isn't great - but also, you run out of money. So having the finance overview is so important."

That's what a founder told me during the research that shaped what we're building at Seapoint. Over the past year, I've spoken to 50+ European founders about their finances. The same frustration came up again and again: the people building Europe's most innovative companies are flying blind when it comes to their own financial position.

And here's what makes it worse - the problem doesn't get easier as you scale. It gets harder.

The spreadsheet that runs your company

When you're a three-person team, scrappy financial processes are fine. A Google Sheet, a folder of invoices, some mental arithmetic. But the moment you raise serious capital and start scaling, everything breaks.

"The source of truth is the Google Sheet where we pile it all together," one founder admitted. Another, running a team of 20+, described his investor reporting workflow: "I have to send this to the bookkeepers, they send me back a PDF report that I send to investors. In my mind, it's nonsensical - they're basically pulling it out of Sage, changing the format, slapping a logo on it and putting it into a PDF. I don't see why I can't just have a dashboard."

The pattern is consistent. Founders piece together their financial picture from multiple bank accounts, cryptic statements, and spreadsheets that grow more complex by the month. By the time you have a clear view of last month, you're already three weeks into the next one.

"If you end up having a three-week close period at the end of each month, you're always looking in the rearview mirror," another founder told me. "And that is bad, especially in a very rapidly growing business."

The scaling trap

Here's what nobody tells you: the faster you grow, the less visibility you have.

With five employees, missing a financial detail is embarrassing. With twenty-five employees depending on you making payroll, it's catastrophic. Yet the processes that worked at five people - the spreadsheets, the manual reconciliation, the quarterly check-ins with your accountant - those don't scale. They break exactly when the stakes are highest.

One founder captured the trajectory perfectly: "It's all very manual process, all that kind of crap. It's working for us right now, but we're totally in a scale phase. It's a headache now, it's going to be a migraine very soon, then it will turn into a full-blown implosion."

Another, who'd just raised a significant Series A, was equally direct: "What we don't have right now is good monthly reporting on accounting. It does live in Xero, but if we wanted to do a monthly P&L, it's still a little bit messy."

These aren't early-stage founders figuring things out. These are companies with millions in funding and dozens of employees, still flying blind.

Why your accountant can't save you

Here's an uncomfortable truth: most founders have never run a business before. They're not accountants. They don't have financial backgrounds. So when faced with the complexity of managing company finances, many just throw it over the wall, "That's the accountant's problem."

But your accountant can't actually solve this. They're essential for compliance, including tax returns, statutory accounts, and ensuring you're legal. But they're not set up for real-time operational visibility. They work in monthly or quarterly cycles, not the daily reality of running a scaling business.

"I hate logging into Xero," one founder told me bluntly. "It's kind of useless to be honest, aside from just looking at bank balances."

The tools accountants use, such as Xero, Sage, and QuickBooks, were built for accountants. They're designed around compliance and categorisation, not the real-time decision-making that running a startup demands. Your accountant gets what they need. You get PDFs three weeks after the fact.

Meanwhile, your financial stack multiplies. One founder laughed ruefully: "Our fractional CFO has concocted a financial stack more complex than the product we're trying to build."

The hidden cost of not knowing

The consequences of financial blindness aren't abstract. They show up in very concrete ways.

"I feel like we're just paying so much on random software subscriptions, but it's really hard to find out," one founder confessed. Without visibility, forgotten subscriptions and unused tools quietly eat away at runway. That €200/month analytics tool nobody uses? It adds up to €2,400 per year—and most founders have several of these lurking in their expenses.

Another founder preparing for fundraising shared his experience: "When it came to fundraising, the biggest challenge was building a budget or forecast. I had no idea how. I knew what I was spending each month, but not where it was going or how to project it forward."

This is the cruel irony. At the exact moment you need financial clarity most - when you're raising, when you're scaling, when you're making critical hiring decisions - your financial picture is at its messiest.

And here's the psychology that makes it worse, many founders respond to this anxiety by sticking their heads in the sand. They know they should be on top of their finances, but because it's something they're not naturally good at, they avoid it. "We've just raised, there's plenty of money in the bank, I don't need to worry about this right now." Until, of course, it's too late. The founders who get into trouble aren't stupid or careless. They're human. They avoided the thing that scared them until avoidance was no longer an option.

What we're building

Every founder I spoke to described the same wish: "We want an active view of the business. It's just a manual process for us right now, we'd love someone to just go in and be able to do that."

This is exactly what we're building with Seapoint.

We connect all your bank accounts, across currencies, across entities, and unify them with your accounting data. Within minutes of connecting, you have a real-time view of your complete financial position. No spreadsheets. No waiting for your accountant. No three-week delays.

Our AI automatically categorises transactions, flags anomalies, and surfaces the insights that actually matter: that subscription you forgot to cancel, the vendor whose invoices have quietly increased 40% over six months, the burn rate trend that needs attention before it becomes a crisis.

The result is simple: you can answer "what's our burn rate?" or "how much runway do we have?" in seconds, not days. You can walk into a board meeting or investor call knowing exactly where you stand.

And because we built Seapoint as a complete financial platform, not just a dashboard, you can also pay invoices, run payroll, and manage expenses in the same place. One login. One view. One source of truth.

Why this matters

I've been a founder multiple times. I've lived the anxiety of not knowing exactly where the cash stands, of making decisions based on gut feel when the stakes are highest.

Running out of money is still the number one reason startups fail. The founders building Europe's future deserve better than spreadsheets and stale PDFs. They deserve to know, in real-time, exactly where they stand.

That's what Seapoint delivers.

We're currently in private beta. Within minutes of connecting your accounts, you'll have the financial clarity that used to take weeks. Join the waitlist here, we're onboarding new companies every week.

‍