Profitual, the Fredericton startup whose AI models help other startups master their financial projections, has closed a $1 million round of funding led by the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation.

Two-and-a-half years after its initial $1 million funding round, the financial intelligence startup raised its second round with a $370,000 contribution from NBIF. It also received $40,000 from the Chuck Fraser Fund, which supports startups launched by people associated with the University of New Brunswick. The rest of the money came from angel investors, who collectively accounted for most of the dollars raised.

“"We’re excited to invest in this promising New Brunswick-based fintech startup and to join a strong group of investors backing their growth," said NBIF President and CEO Jeff White.

Profitual’s software allows startup founders to upload the spreadsheets containing their financial projections to get an instant analysis of the stronger and weaker parts of their financial models. With the new funding, the company plans to build out new features so the product becomes valuable to more advanced companies.

“We’re planning on building out those reporting features so we can go after more mature startups as clients,” said CEO Raymond Fitzpatrick in an interview Monday. “We’re not looking to add people. The one thing I told our team when we closed the round was. ‘Let’s not add people; let’s get as efficient as we can.’”

A former director of finance and investments at NBIF, Fitzpatrick led a team that founded Profitual in 2022 and took the company to the NextAI accelerator in Montreal in 2024. On graduating from the accelerator, the instructors enthusiastically encouraged Fitzpatrick to raise a substantial round, targeting a round of $2 million or more.

When asked in the interview how he found the environment for raising capital when he was out looking for investment, Fitzpatrick quickly responded, “Horrible,” with a chuckle.

Starting last October, he began approaching investors with a goal of raising $1.5 million and had trouble convincing them the company merited that much investment. So early this year, Fitzpatrick, his team and advisers rethought the situation and decided to aim for a $500,000 round, targeting angel investors. This tack was so successful that Fitzpatrick doubled his amended target, closing with two-thirds of what he originally wanted.

Fitzpatrick added that the Profitual product resonates with angels because a lot of them grew their own businesses and wish they'd had something similar when they were starting out.

The underlying Profitual business is doing well, said Fitzpatrick. In the fiscal year that ended in November, revenues increased 33 percent and six months into the current year the company has about 100 paying customers. The seven-member team has been working on developing AI-driven features for the platform that will help clients with such tasks as onboarding customers and customer support. They are also producing automated reports that detail the analysis of startups’ financial projections.

“We’ve built a ton of new features,” said Fitzpatrick. “We’ve built a really good platform to provide a financial forecast that shows how a business is performing compared to its plan. It uses AI to help with the analysis on where they were on- and off-plan.”