From Service to Platform: How Zeni Transformed Traditional Finance Services into a Scalable SaaS Product

From Service to Platform: How Zeni Transformed Traditional Finance Services into a Scalable SaaS Product

Finance operations in startups have followed the same playbook for decades: hire a part-time bookkeeper, add a CFO when you can afford one, and watch as Excel sheets fly back and forth over email. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Zeni co-founder Swapnil Shinde revealed how experiencing this fragmented approach firsthand led to reimagining the entire model.

The Breaking Point with Traditional Services

The catalyst for Zeni’s creation came from a painful realization at their previous startup, Mezzi. “I literally remember a scenario where at Mezzi, I asked my finance team that, hey, why did our burn rate increase by 30%?” Swapnil recalls. “And I was already sitting at the end of the next month and I was asking about the previous month because that is when the books were closed.”

This delay in financial visibility highlighted a fundamental flaw in the traditional service model. Startups were operating with outdated information, forcing reactive rather than proactive financial management.

Identifying the Structural Problem

The issue wasn’t just about slow service – it was baked into the business model itself. As Swapnil explains, “When someone works on an hourly basis, they actually create more work for themselves. They will add more manual stuff so that they can charge you for more hours.”

This misalignment of incentives meant that service providers were actually rewarded for being less efficient. The solution wouldn’t just be about making existing processes faster – it required completely reimagining the service delivery model.

Building a Platform, Not Just Another Service

Zeni’s approach was to combine technology and expertise in a new way: “We wanted to build a platform that can automate your bookkeeping and accounting to a level where we almost do a virtual close on your book every single day.”

The key innovation wasn’t just the technology – it was the business model. “We are incentivized to automate stuff for you because we are a SaaS platform,” Swapnil notes. This fundamental shift aligned Zeni’s interests with their customers’ need for efficiency and real-time insights.

The Human-AI Hybrid Model

Rather than trying to fully automate everything, Zeni recognized the importance of human expertise. “AI cannot power 100% of it. So we have a dedicated team of finance experts who collaborate with AI to stitch an experience that is ten x faster than what you might have today.”

This hybrid approach has proven successful. The platform now manages “more than $1 billion in finances every single month” across nearly 400 startups, with “70% of our customers are actually moving to us from using finance firms.”

Creating a New Category

The transformation from service to platform isn’t just about adding technology – it’s about creating a new category entirely. “We are actually disrupting an extremely old business, which was extremely human intensive. It’s not sexy at all,” Swapnil explains.

Looking ahead, the vision is to become “that one all in one finance operation platform that uses Gen AI to run your entire finance department for you.” The evolution continues as they move from “people assisting the platform to do your accounting and bookkeeping” to where “the platform will start assisting the other human experts.”

For B2B founders looking to transform traditional service industries, Zeni’s journey offers key insights: identify structural problems in existing business models, align incentives through platform thinking, and find the right balance between automation and human expertise. The goal isn’t just to be faster or cheaper – it’s to fundamentally reimagine how value is delivered to customers.