Profitual, a financial intelligence startup that specializes in working with other young companies, is revamping its branding and has launched a new, free product. 

In an interview Tuesday, CEO Raymond Fitzpatrick said the Fredericton-based company has tweaked its business development strategy after completing this year’s AI cohort from accelerator NEXT Canada. Fitzpatrick was speaking from Montreal, where he was participating in the program’s demo day.

“We know we’re a brand new company,” he said. “Not a lot of brand recognition. When we would start talking to companies about why they should work with us and use our platform to build their financial forecasts, a lot of times they would say, ‘Well how do I know you guys are any good? How are you special?’

“What we’ve (just released), we’ve called the Forecast Evaluator. Any startup that has an Excel financial model, they can upload it to our website, and in about three minutes, you get an analysis back on where your financial model is strong, where there’s areas that need improvement.”

The free tool is aimed specifically at startups looking to raise pre-seed or seed funding rounds, and its feedback is tailored to help companies bring their financial models in line with the best practices that investors will expect. Profitual founder Fitzpatrick has expertise of his own on the topic, having worked as an executive at the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation.

Now, their team’s flagship product is an artificial intelligence system that probes small and medium-sized enterprises’ financial records to generate models, revenue projections and other calculations, with a particular eye towards helping young businesses raise capital.

If startups like what they see from the Forecast Evaluator, they can then reach out to Profitual to discuss more comprehensive paid tools, having already seen some of the company’s technology in action.

Fitzpatrick’s team has worked with over 100 startups across Canada since they founded Profitual in 2021. The largest proportion of those startups are in Atlantic Canada, but the company has clients in every province. In 2022, Profitual raised $1.2 million, with another funding round now in the works.

The money will go towards further building out Profitual’s suite of AI tools, as well as ramping up business development efforts in western Canada and possibly the U.S., Fitzpatrick said.

Underpinning those efforts will be the light rebranding that Profitual’s eight-person team recently executed, which involves the company retaining its name, but switching its web domain to “.ai”. The company has adopted a new logo with darker, bolder colours to replace the stylized illustration of a financial chart that the company had used since its launch.

“What we’re trying to do now is go a little bit deeper, especially from Toronto west, trying to strengthen our brand and build more roots,” Fitzpatrick said.