The CEO of Ottawa-based MindBridge Analytics says he’s never witnessed anything that can equal AI’s potential to fundamentally alter how businesses operate – and his company is at the forefront of that revolution.
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In a tech career spanning four decades, Stephen DeWitt has seen a lot of “next big things.”
But the CEO of Ottawa-based MindBridge Analytics says he’s never witnessed anything that can equal AI’s potential to fundamentally alter how businesses operate – and his company is at the forefront of that revolution.
MindBridge, which uses artificial intelligence to help auditors detect irregularities and errors in accounting documents, is perhaps the brightest star in Ottawa’s growing AI firmament.
Founded in 2015 by serial entrepreneur Solon Angel, the firm immediately staked its claim as a company to watch in the AI-for-accountants space, raising more than $40 million in venture capital and establishing a foothold across the Atlantic with its 2020 acquisition of U.K.-based fintech startup Brevis.
In 2023, MindBridge signed a deal with KPMG to integrate its software into the global professional services giant’s accounting platform, ensuring the Ottawa firm’s AI would become entrenched in more than 140 countries. The company also secured an additional US$60 million in funding in a round led by PSG Equity LLC.
Since then, MindBridge has aggressively courted customers in verticals beyond its sweet spot in the financial services sector. Its growing roster of enterprise clients now includes Chevron and other Fortune 1000-level organizations.
MindBridge, which has about 150 employees, has seen its revenues grow 500 per cent in the past five years. Last month, the company added veteran fintech executive Thierry Truche to its leadership team as senior vice-president and general manager of its enterprise business unit with the aim of landing even more global customers.
DeWitt, the man in charge of navigating MindBridge’s ascent, recently sat down with OBJ reporter David Sali to discuss the new addition to his firm’s brain trust as well as the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. This is an edited transcript of that conversation.=
OBJ: What really excites you about MindBridge’s potential?
SD: This is a little Ottawa company that could … founded in the golden era of data science and then had to endure all the slings and arrows of things like COVID and market downturns and being on the cutting edge of AI. Given all the heritage there, I think the hiring of Thierry really is a bells-and-whistles signal of a company that is now in the lobbies of really big customers that matter. When you hear us talk about our customer base, you hear us talk about firms like KPMG and Chevron – (businesses) that are in your mutual funds or your RRSPs. These are companies that are big, they’re gnarly, they’re changing dramatically as a result of AI. In big companies – I ran a big chunk of Hewlett-Packard – (financial anomalies) are common stuff. And when you think about software being able to find it, mitigate it and orchestrate a control system around it, we haven't been here before. The products that we’re delivering to our customers have never been built before … just like the first time you went into ChatGPT and went, ‘Holy s—.’”
OBJ: What does Thierry Truche bring to the company?
SD: He knows the global enterprise markets as well as anybody you’re going to find, knows the discipline of finance as well as anybody. We’re in a big growth mode right now. We’re dealing with a very sophisticated evolution of our company right now. We’re a little company based in Ottawa that’s trying to meet the requirements of global companies at a moment of critical transformation. This is the proving ground. Growing up our processes, growing up how we build software to the highest quality possible and then delivering innovation. All those internal processes, he’s an expert at. He’s just a great leader.
OBJ: So in other words, his hiring is part of the groundwork you’re laying to take that next step.
SD: I couldn’t have said it better. We’re going through the classic scaling moment that companies go through. Look, I’ve been doing this for 40 years. It sort of feels like old hat to me, but for a lot of our employees, this isn’t old hat. There are not a lot of young companies in Ottawa that cross the chasm and step up to the mainstreet opportunities that are out there. The ones that (did) have become historic. We’re trying to take our place there. We have a lot to do. We’re building that culture of both performance and intense innovation. We’re in a moment where I don’t think we have anything we can compare this to. I’ve built companies at the outset of the internet, the cloud, mobility, networking in general. This is a whole different animal.
OBJ: How so?
SD: If you’re going to look at (financial data) all the time in a way that matters to Chevron or KPMG or any of our customers, that’s hard to do. You’re dealing with a massive explosion (of data). We look at those derivative points through hundreds of algorithms that all have identifiers. We find in minutes what’s impossible to find otherwise.
OBJ: What are the biggest challenges MindBridge is facing right now?
SD: A typical large business like a Hewlett-Packard will have thousands of controls across their financial world – how you pay people, how you create invoices, how you reconcile your books, how you do your financial reporting, everything. Across that, there are thousands of controls, and those controls span multiple systems. The control system of the past doesn’t cut it. It’s not all perfect yet. We’re not quite at continuous (analysis of data) yet. A typical big bank has billions and billions of transactions on a given day. So it’s hard. But GPUs, parallel computing, the stacks that we’re building nowadays, how we separate analytics into chunks, we’ve learned how to do this. We’re now right on the verge of continuous (data analysis). My comparison of the impact of continuous analysis is roughly the tipping point for when everyone went to the cloud. Once this capability reaches main street, you’ll be non-competitive without it.
As a young company, we’re sitting at the grown-ups’ table at Thanksgiving with a lot of really important companies in moments of transformation. We don't have to prove to people the power of our AI. Our AI is what attracted those people to us. We have a really powerful engine here. If you think of the Canadarm on the Space Shuttle, we may have something (similar) here. We’ve got a lot of demand, which is exciting. We’re on the proving ground right now.
OBJ: How do you grow that enterprise customer base?
SD: That’s something we talk about every week. Chevron led to Shell, Mars led to Colgate, Howard Hughes (Holdings) led to JLL. These are companies that are in effectively the identical industry with one another and the identical moment of transformation. While competitors are fiercely competitive, they tend to flock together because the disruption is pretty clear. That’s really important for a company like us. We’re a really powerful engine that needs to be pointed somewhere. We have probably a dozen use cases that are our bread and butter right now. We’re at a point in our maturation where those use cases are attracting customers that are looking for exactly those use cases. Birds of a feather flock together.
Not to get into politics – because I think it will make us all throw up in our mouths – but the reality is it’s a boomtown for us (in the U.S.). We have a lot of (customers) trying to look at a lot of things with very few people. As soon as they do that, we usually get a phone call. The state of Georgia, if you can imagine auditing all of a state’s educational institutions. KPMG has about 100,000 auditors. If you added their workforce and all of the existing auditors on Earth, it would take them about half a billion years to do the analysis that we do. So this is the moment where technology is (permeating) this industry, and it’s going to transform everything. The workforces of accounting firms are going to look very different. I’m sure you're already seeing it in the way you do your taxes. Ten years from now (it will be) completely different.
OBJ: What’s keeping you up at night as you look to really scale?
SD: Politics. There are all sorts of concerns there. From a practical perspective, if I’m talking to one of our investors – because I’m up all night thinking about our investors – geopolitical risk equates to enterprise risk immediately. There is an immediate correlation. If I’m going to be facing 30 per cent tariffs on my dolls, then I’m probably going to cut back on expenditures of things like (MindBridge’s software).
Above and beyond geopolitical stuff … I think we’re underestimating the amount of change that is coming our way (due to AI). As CEO of a company like this, I worry that even as an innovator (we need to hold) ourselves to an even higher bar. Because (change) is coming really fast. And that requires strategy and that requires (looking at what) you do from a capital perspective. I’ve been a strategist for my entire career. The strategy (that’s required) here is more sophisticated than in any moment in my professional history. The ability to play it all at the right time, to bring the right capabilities to our customers, that's tricky.
On the flip side … Chevron laid off 40 per cent of their finance department. If I walked into your office tomorrow and laid off 40 per cent of the people and asked you to do more (and spend less), what would you do? You’d start looking to AI and other things that are out there. Name a company that isn’t going through some degree of that reality. Again, that’s usually when the phone rings.
