Three scenes from startup life that shouldn’t still be happening in 2025.
Scene one. A first-time founder sits in a WeWork, staring at a downloaded financial model template. It has 14 tabs. One of them is called “Assumptions” but half the actual assumptions live in formulas scattered across other tabs. She changes the headcount in month 6 and the model spits out negative cash for month 4. That’s not possible. She spends two hours finding the broken formula. She has a pitch in three days.
Scene two. A startup CFO joins a 40-person company. The previous finance lead left behind a Google Sheet with 2,000 rows and a README that says “don’t touch column M.” The board wants updated projections by Friday. The CFO starts rebuilding from scratch because auditing the existing model would take longer.
Scene three. A founder preps for a board meeting. The board wants to see three scenarios: base case, conservative, and aggressive. The founder copies the spreadsheet three times, makes changes, then realizes the base case had an error in the hiring timeline. She fixes it in one copy. Now she has to remember what she changed in the other two and apply the fix there too. This takes most of a day.
These aren’t edge cases. This is normal. This is what startup financial modeling looks like for the vast majority of companies.
The tool gap
Over the past few years, several companies tried to fix this. Finmark, Causal, and Pry all built startup-focused financial modeling tools. All three were acquired and pulled from the market. Finmark is being sunset in April 2026. The others are already gone.
That leaves founders with two options: spreadsheets or enterprise FP&A tools priced at $10K to $165K per year. The spreadsheet is free but fragile. The enterprise tool is built for 500-person finance teams, not a founder and maybe a part-time CFO.
There’s a gap. Burncast fills it.
Our philosophy
We built Burncast around three principles that came directly from watching founders struggle.
Structured flexibility
Spreadsheets give you total freedom, which sounds good until you realize it means total freedom to make mistakes. Every cell can contain anything. There are no guardrails.
Burncast gives you structure where it helps and flexibility where it matters. Your financial model has a defined shape – revenue, team, expenses, funding rounds, projections – but within each section, you control the assumptions. You decide your growth curve for hiring. You pick your revenue model. You set the terms for each funding round.
The structure means Burncast can do things spreadsheets can’t. It can generate your income statement automatically. It can calculate your cap table (the ownership breakdown of your company) after each funding round. It can show your runway – how many months until you run out of cash – and update it when any assumption changes.
Progressive disclosure
Not every founder needs to understand the difference between a SAFE (a type of investment agreement that converts to equity later) and a convertible note on day one. But some do. And the founder who doesn’t need it today might need it in six months.
Burncast shows you what you need at each stage. Start with revenue and expenses. Add team members when you’re ready to model hiring. Model your first funding round when fundraising gets real. The full depth is always there. You don’t have to use it all at once.
Education embedded, not bolted on
Most financial tools assume you already speak finance. They use terms like “dilution” and “pre-money valuation” without explanation, and your options are to already know what they mean or go figure it out somewhere else.
Burncast defines 26 financial terms inline, right where you encounter them. Not in a help center. Not in a separate glossary page. In the interface, next to the number you’re looking at. You build your financial model and learn the vocabulary at the same time.
This matters because founders make better decisions when they understand what the numbers mean. A founder who knows what dilution actually represents will negotiate differently than one who’s just trying to get the cell to show a reasonable-looking percentage.
What we’re building toward
Burncast today handles the core workflow: model your team, revenue, expenses, and funding rounds. Get projections, financial statements, cap tables, and scenario comparisons.
But the vision is larger. We want Burncast to be the place where founders go to understand their business financially. Not just to produce a document for investors, but to genuinely understand what drives their burn rate, what assumptions matter most, and what their options look like under different conditions.
Financial modeling shouldn’t require a finance degree. It shouldn’t require a weekend of spreadsheet debugging. It should be something every founder can do confidently.
That’s why we built Burncast.