Every startup founder has lived this moment: you open a Google Sheet, stare at a blank grid, and try to turn your business into rows and columns. Maybe you download a template. Maybe you copy one from a friend who raised a Series A. Either way, you spend the next two weeks building something fragile, praying nobody asks you to change an assumption.
We built Burncast because that process is broken, and it doesn’t have to be.
The spreadsheet problem
Spreadsheet financial models fail startups in three specific ways.
First, formulas and assumptions are tangled together. When your revenue growth rate lives inside a =B7*1.15 buried in cell Q42, nobody can find it. Nobody can change it safely. And when someone does change it, something else breaks silently. You won’t notice until your board meeting.
Second, spreadsheets assume you already know finance. Terms like “pre-money valuation” and “dilution” show up in templates with no explanation. If you’re a first-time founder, you’re Googling terms while simultaneously trying to model your business. That’s a bad combination.
Third, exploring alternative plans is painful. Want to see what happens if you raise less money and hire slower? You duplicate the entire sheet, change a few numbers, and now you have two disconnected models that drift apart immediately. Comparing them side by side requires yet another sheet.
What Burncast does differently
Burncast is a financial modeling tool built specifically for startups. Not a spreadsheet with training wheels. Not an enterprise FP&A tool stripped down. A purpose-built tool that understands how startups actually work.
Your assumptions stay separate from calculations. You tell Burncast your monthly revenue growth rate is 15%. It handles the math across your income statement, runway projections, and burn rate. Change that 15% to 12%, and every downstream number updates correctly. No formulas to audit. No broken references.
Financial terms are explained where you need them. Burncast includes an inline glossary with 26 financial terms defined in context. Hover over “post-money valuation” and get a clear definition plus how it relates to the number you’re looking at. You learn finance vocabulary while building your model, not in a separate tab.
Scenarios are a core capability, not a workaround. Create a scenario by changing only what’s different from your base plan. Burncast uses delta-based scenario modeling: your “conservative hiring” scenario only stores the assumptions you changed. Everything else stays linked to your base plan. Compare scenarios side by side without maintaining parallel spreadsheets.
Funding rounds that match how raises actually work
Burncast supports four funding round types: priced equity, convertible notes, SAFEs, and option pools. For each one, you can enter valuations three different ways – as a dilution percentage, a pre-money valuation, or a price per share. Use whichever framing makes sense for the conversation you’re having.
If your lead investor says “we want 20% of the company,” enter that directly. If they quote a $5M pre-money valuation (the value of your company before the investment), enter that instead. Burncast converts between them and shows you the cap table impact either way.
Who this is for
Burncast is built for startup founders modeling their first or fifth company, CFOs who inherited a spreadsheet they’re afraid to touch, and accelerator teams helping a cohort of companies get their finances in order.
If you’ve ever spent a weekend debugging a circular reference in your financial model, or wondered whether your runway calculation is actually right, this is for you.
Get started
Burncast is available now. Build your first financial model in minutes, not weeks, and actually understand what the numbers mean.