UK-founded Tracelight, an AI company making financial models easier to build and trust, has raised $3.6M (approximately €3M) in seed funding led by Chalfen Ventures.
Chalfen Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm that backs software startups aiming to grow & dominate new and often unusual markets.
Mike Chalfen, Solo VC at Chalfen Ventures, says, “The most magical AI tools work at the highest level of abstraction, making them radically easy to adopt, while understanding and executing complex work under the hood. Tracelight does that. It has taken the world’s most widely used modelling platform and embedded AI, where it can have an immediate impact. And its rapid adoption by analysts in demanding modelling environments shows just how big the opportunity is.”
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Other investors, including Acequia Capital, Inovo and EF, as well as angels, including Charlie Songhurst (ex Microsoft head of Corporate Strategy) and Suhit Gupta (ex-CIO General Atlantic and Carlyle), also participated.
The new funding will enable the UK company to build out the product, team and distribution to serve the world’s finance and strategy professionals.
What does Tracelight solve?
Financial models are essential to global finance, impacting mergers, investments, and strategic decisions worth trillions of dollars.
However, this area has not embraced the AI revolution.
The tools for financial modelling have not changed much in years, with Microsoft Excel still being the main software used.
Here’s where Tracelight bridges the gap between financial models and large language models (LLMs).
Peter Fuller, co-founder and CEO of Tracelight, says, “Complex financial models underpin all of the corporate world’s most important decisions. Until now, LLMs have barely touched this workflow. Tracelight is purpose-built for this; it works seamlessly inside the tools analysts already trust. Our aim is to take away the entire mechanical workload of financial modelling. Our users act as directors and orchestrators of AI that is quickly becoming superhuman at the task of Excel analysis.’
Tracelight: AI engine for complex financial modelling
Founded in 2024 by Peter Fuller (a former McKinsey consultant and Entrepreneur First team lead), Aleksander Misztal (ex-Jane Street engineer) and Janek Zimoch (founding engineer at 11x), Tracelight turns spreadsheet logic into LLM-friendly data.
By integrating directly into the spreadsheet workflow and enhancing how LLMs interpret and work with Excel, Tracelight eliminates repetitive modelling tasks.
The use of AI enhances analysts’ capabilities, allowing them to write complex formulas, validate models, and perform analyses based on simple natural language prompts.
This technology acts as a force multiplier, enabling analysts to model faster and more intelligently without altering their usual workflows.
Since launch, Tracelight has gained early traction among analysts at investment banks, private credit investment and private equity houses and leading professional services firms.
Early users are already reporting >90 per cent time savings on laborious modelling tasks like building common analyses, formatting, and finding errors.
Crucially, Tracelight keeps humans in control of decision-making. Rather than replacing analysts, it enables them to build better financial models and focus on high-stakes decisions where human judgment is essential.
Aleksander Misztal, co-founder and CTO of Tracelight, adds, “The financial models used by investors, consultants, bankers and corporate finance professionals are large, logically complex, and formatted according to strict rules. Our technology unlocks the full reasoning power of frontier LLMs on these files; for the first time, Excel financial modellers will be able to tap into the power of frontier AI models directly in their existing workflow.’
