This Entrepreneur Raised $100 Million To Build An AI-Native Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) Platform For Early Enterprise and Mid-Market Companies

Julio Martinez has followed an entrepreneurial path that began with training as a lawyer in Barcelona, then led to a global investment-banking role, and culminated in a Y Combinator-backed CEO role. His story is a masterclass in pattern recognition, product rigor, and the courage to jump into the unknown.

Today, Julio is the co-founder and CEO of Abacum, an AI-native Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) platform used by finance teams across 40+ countries. He has raised more than $100M from elite global funds like Scale Venture Partners, Y Combinator, Cathay Innovation, Creandum, and Atomico.

In the process, Julio outpaced well-funded competitors who burned out and built what he believes will become the uncontested category leader in financial planning software. He aced product-market fit, scaled the business, navigated financing cycles, and hired top talent.

But the story behind that ascent is one of deep discipline, calculated risk, global perspective, and an evolution from obsessing over outcomes to mastering the craft of inputs. This is the inside story of how Julio built Abacum and what every founder can learn from the path he carved.

Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here.

Barcelona Roots, Global Curiosity, and a Career Built on First Principles

Julio grew up in Barcelona, a city he describes as cosmopolitan, culturally rich, and, over the last 15 years, an increasingly vibrant European tech hub. About 20% to 25% of the city’s population comprises professionals who moved here for tech jobs, contributing to the pulsating energy.

The thriving blend of architecture, international talent, great cuisines, and opportunity shaped Julio’s global mindset early.

As he points out, Barcelona characterizes knowledge transfer and the capacity to learn across fields. The city inspires people to reinvent themselves and apply that through first principles, learning new disciplines with a fresh approach and a fresh eye on things.

But Julio’s own career began far from startups. He trained as a corporate finance and M&A lawyer, a role he says taught him the earliest building blocks of excellence. Still, law wasn’t enough.

Transitioning to Investment Banking

“When I looked across the table, the bankers were the ones making the calls,” Julio explains. “We structured the deals, but they defined strategy. I felt I wanted to be on the other side.” He felt he could create greater value and find more meaning on the other side of the fence.

That instinct led Julio into investment banking, where he worked across New York, São Paulo, Zurich, London, and his native Barcelona, all while raising three children with his wife. Those years became his professional crucible, enveloping him in a high-intensity, high-commitment environment.

Banking exposed Julio to pattern recognition, driving outcomes, and customer engagement. He also learned what makes companies succeed, derail, or stagnate. He saw how clarity, strategy, and focus directly translated into enterprise value, startup success, and the development of technology and products.

Julio learned to avoid unfocused M&A, unfounded synergies that are difficult to execute and deliver, and over-expansive product footprints. It was training he would later weaponize as a founder. A crucial takeaway was to choose a simple idea and build on it through a dogged pursuit of excellence.

Developing a Global Perspective

As Julio reminisces, he recalls having moved and traveled extensively around the world. Experiences and exposure to different cultures and ways of life opened up whole new perspectives. He finds them incredibly enriching, for him and his wife.

From a professional standpoint, Julio learned about different angles and the market’s versatility. He realized that people in Europe and the US are somewhat Western-centric. But living in Asia or Latin America, particularly Brazil, gave him a distinct viewpoint.

Not everything gravitates around the Atlantic and the Northern Hemisphere.

The Unexpected Pivot: A Mentor Opens the Door to Venture Building

Julio never planned to become an entrepreneur. The transition from lawyer to banker to founder was a radical shift. However, Julio had always been obsessed with challenges. His international career is a great example of the personal challenge of adapting and satisfying natural curiosity.

In fact, when a mentor invited Julio to co-found a new Venture Studio focused on launching fintech products, he initially said no. “I was a happy banker. I didn’t see myself building products,” he recalled. “I didn’t have a lot of product experience, but something about the challenge started to pull me in.”

Eventually, Julio made the 180-degree leap—and everything changed. Within the Venture Studio, Julio discovered something he had never experienced in law or banking: purpose. Building products lit him up. He found a sense of purpose and loved his craft like never before.

As Julio recalls, “It became clear: this wasn’t about launching products anymore. This was about solving a real, deep problem, and it was my calling.” After four years of hands-on product building, he was ready to solve a problem he knew intimately, one that would become the genesis of Abacum.

As a finance professional, Julio understood FB&A and corporate finance; here, he was dealing with messy legacy systems. He had a sense of mission and a sense of challenge and was ready to move forward.

Launching Abacum: A PowerPoint, Zero Capital, Three Kids, and the Worst Week in Global Markets

When Julio decided to start Abacum, he had everything except the perfect timing. He left banking, with three children ages seven, four, and one. He had no funding, no team, and only a PowerPoint describing his vision for a next-gen FP&A platform. Then came the knockout punch.

Julio’s first week as a founder coincided with Spain’s first COVID lockdown, one of the strictest in the world. Investors weren’t deploying capital. Early hires and engineers needed to be recruited via Zoom, something no one did in early 2020.

Portfolio companies were drowning, and funds were focused on triage, not invention. Investors were seeking to refinance and recapitalize some of their existing companies. All projections pointed to a 10-year recession and an unprecedented tech bubble.

But Julio and his co-founder, Jorge, made the same bet: if we’re building a 20-year company, the macro environment doesn’t matter. Let others freeze. We won’t correlate to the market. We’ll build.

For six months, they paid their engineers out of pocket, burned through savings, built an MVP, and fought through the desert. It was brutal. But it laid the foundation for everything that followed.

The Power of Y Combinator: Age is Not a Deterrent

As Julio recalls, the decision to attend Y Combinator was not made too early, but at precisely the right time. Abacum was gaining traction in Europe and the US. The US was their primary target market and ready to tap.

Julio and Jorge quickly realized that one of Abacum’s core products was for B2B SaaS companies, and that the US accounted for 75% of global B2B SaaS revenues, including China and other Asian countries.

Abacum was poised to fundamentally change and disrupt the whole industry, FP&A software, and the office of the CFO. The cofounders needed to move into the US quickly. Y Combinator gave Abacum significant recognition and credibility, helping it land those early customers.

The platform also provided the duo with company-building advice, which was incredibly valuable for the early-stage founders. Julio and Jorge, both in their late 30s, were among the older founders in the batch. They entered feeling confident. They left transformed.

Abacum was the second company accepted in its batch. As Julio points out, age should not be a deterrent for aspiring founders. In his opinion, some of the best entrepreneurs execute later in life despite some of the successes that you see today.

When Experience Meets Brutal Honesty – Letting Go of Preconceptions

YC partner feedback was “brutal, direct, and humbling.” Since Julio and Jorge were experienced, they were confident in their knowledge of the company and its product. However, Michael Siebel, the former CEO of Y Combinator, was highly successful. And Gustav was a super seasoned executive.

Both were known for their direct, straightforward feedback. Julio concedes that they entered YC with a lot of preconceptions, which he had to set aside. He credits the program with rewiring his approach to company building, speed, execution, commitment, and bottleneck-driven prioritization.

While the typical YC program is three months, Abacum took a bit longer as it was the first company accepted in the batch. Julio recalls that they already held office hours and partner meetings before the program. They worked long hours with operational rigor.

Julio adopted three rituals that still define Abacum’s culture:

1. Weekly co-founder Sunday meetings
   • What are the goals for the week?
   • What do we need to accomplish?
   • Where are we stuck?
   • How do we hold each other accountable?
2. Bottleneck analysis obsession – you need drive and maniacal urgency to solve them
   • “What matters at this point in time?”
   • “What is the single biggest constraint to growth today?”
   • “If everything is important, nothing is.”
3. Founder-led urgency
4. Energy is not enough—energy must be channeled.

Looking back on his time at Y Combinator, Julio talks about the valuable founder-centric tactics he learned. The program provided them with critical building blocks for the company, including product-market fit, early go-to-market, brand building, and team care.

The company accelerated. Pipeline grew. Metrics exploded.

The Abacum Business Model

As Julio explains, Abacum is primarily a B2B SaaS provider that charges a recurring subscription fee with add-ons. Its main customers are finance teams at mid-market and early enterprise companies. Abacum adds a financial planning and analysis (FP&A) solution.

Next, it connects to various data sources across the company, including accounting software such as NetSuite and Intacct, CRM systems such as Salesforce, HubSpot, and ATP, and the underlying data warehouse, HIRS, and Workday.

The tool crunches all the metrics and provides the finance team with a single source of truth. Thus, companies have all the crucial metrics in one place, ready for analysis, always in real time. Think accounting data, but also the operational KPIs, the leading indicators that move the needle for a business.

With that wealth of data at its fingertips, a company can easily produce reports to inform its management team, board of directors, and CEO, enabling planning. At Abacum, they handle budgeting, bottom-up and top-down planning, headcount planning, revenue planning, and forecasting.

Particularly meaningful today are scenarios at scale, which are easy to build. Here, companies can have shadow P&Ls. They can slice and dice that data very easily and plan and report at very granular levels, regardless of the number of businesses across varying customer segments, countries, and geographies.

Cracking Product-Market Fit in One of the Hardest Categories in SaaS

As Julio points out, they haven’t invented the FP&A category. The software was invented in the 1970s by DM1 and in the 1980s by Hyperion. Abacum has built a product that is 30x better than existing solutions.

Adaptive was founded in 2003, and Plantful, a host analytics company, was founded in 2001. The software was pre-cloud, not even pre-AI.

At Abacum, they have built a next-generation AI-native FP&A platform, which explains the rapid growth in the business. The product is highly complex, though it sounds simple.

Most founders underestimate the challenge of building FP&A tooling. Julio knew the space as a practitioner, but even then, the complexity surprised him. Abacum wasn’t one product. It was five:

• Deep integrations
• Data cleaning and ETL
• A multidimensional planning engine
• A reporting and visualization layer
• A real-time scenario modeling system

And the buyer persona—finance teams—are among the most sophisticated, highly demanding, and least forgiving buyers in software. Julio concedes that it took them some time to build the capacity to invest in the full depth of the product required.

Outlasting the Competition

Meanwhile, early competitors had raised far more capital, launched a year to 18 months earlier, and were backed by blue-chip Silicon Valley funds. Yet one by one, they began to fail. Although they had the brand, the go-to-market motion, and the capital, they didn’t have the product.

“They all had insane churn,” Julio said. “They scaled go-to-market without actually solving the complexity of FP&A.” Abacum took the opposite path, which included years of slow, disciplined, brutal product investment, years of saying no, and years of prioritizing depth over breadth.

And eventually, it worked. The product clicked, and customers switched from failing competitors. Abacum became the category’s breakout leader. Julio credits the high-caliber product team the company built, the product they delivered, and the high-caliber investors.

As Julio underscores, everyone’s data volumes are increasing, and this is a fast-moving space that requires significant investment in product. Abacum offers a product maturity that extremely sophisticated finance teams value. They understand the fundamental value the product drives.

Abacum is highly flexible and fast to implement. Julio recalls how they took their time perfecting the product. During those years, the competitive landscape collapsed:

• Competitor A: down-round and liquidation preferences underwater
• Competitor B: fire-sale acquisition
• Competitor C: Chapter 11
• Competitor D: churn so high it killed the growth curve

Although they perfected marketing, go-to-market, and brand building, Abacum outlasted them all. Julio is clear about why, “They focused on go-to-market. We focused on the product. In FP&A, product is the moat.”

A Financing Journey Fueled by Strong Metrics and Even Stronger Focus

Abacum has raised over $100M, but every step was hard-earned. However, as Julio underscores, they had great engineers and were paying them well. They built a strong product prototype and raised their seed round. Abacum made it to Demo Day at Y Combinator, a huge positive.

Storytelling is everything that Julio Martinez was able to master. The key is capturing the essence of what you are doing in 15 to 20 slides. For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley legend (see it here), where the most critical slides are highlighted.

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Their fundraising pathway was like:

• Pre-Seed: Middle of COVID. Impossible fundraising environment. Closed anyway.
• Seed: Preempted by Creandum, after having previously rejected him.
• Series A: Preempted again, this time by Atomico, the fund led by Niklas Zennström.
• Series B: A three-year climb through the desert, focused purely on product maturity.

As Julio explains, Abacum sells products to listed companies, mid-market businesses, and large enterprises. Fundamental product investments are needed to maintain operations and meet enterprise performance expectations.

From Outcome Obsession to Input Mastery: Julio’s Hard-Won Leadership Evolution

Julio admits he once obsessed over outcomes: faster growth, bigger rounds, clearer milestones. But that obsession came with pain. “It is a shortcut to unhappiness,” he said. “And it actually makes you a worse leader.” You should focus the teams on what they can control and the inputs.

Entrepreneurs love building companies, being successful with great companies, and building great teams. But, ultimately, having a fulfilling life, doing something meaningful, and making it count is the shortcut to happiness.

Julio credits Bill Walsh’s philosophy in The Score Takes Care of Itself with reshaping his mindset: Channel your obsessions toward inputs, thrive on excellence, and focus on what you can control.

Celebrate small wins. Focus on agility and learning fast. Don’t rush people, and don’t spend your energy on the outcome. “The outcome arrives only when you stop chasing it,” Julio says. “Focus on excellence every day, operate with precision, and it inevitably catches up.”

The Vision: World Domination in FP&A

Julio is not shy about the scale of the ambition. Abacum aims to become the uncontested leader in FP&A software globally. Julio envisions customers in 40+ countries, a product 30x better than legacy incumbents, and a category ripe for disruption after decades of under-innovation.

To Julio, the mission is simple: “We want Abacum in every finance team across the markets we operate. And we’re only on day one.” He is confident they have the best product and are aggressively building it for the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). He obsesses a lot about that.

The Advice He Would Give His Younger Self

Julio’s answer comes not from business, but from martial arts. He says: Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. As he explains, in technology, people obsess about aggression and speed—raising, scaling, expanding.

But world-class companies are built slowly at the beginning. Deep understanding, strong product-market fit foundations, precision in the craft. Once those are mature, you can accelerate and outcompete everyone.”

If he could do it again, Julio would invest more time in product depth, market understanding, patience, thoughtful sequencing, and layering speed only once the foundation is there.

“We’ve built a phenomenal company,” Julio said. “But I had to learn the hard way that moving too fast in a complex category can create unnecessary pain.” Earning 100M, 200M, 300M, or 500M in ARR in one year, two years, a bit faster, or a bit slower doesn’t matter.

The graphs are immaterial; what matters is the difference you create in the industry and in your customers’ lives. Entrepreneurs should learn to shield themselves and quiet the noise so they can keep themselves centered and focused.

Final Reflection

Julio’s story is not about glamour. It’s about grit, craft, reinvention, discipline, and the courage to chase meaning over momentum. From lawyer to banker to venture builder to YC-backed CEO. From Barcelona to Zurich to New York to launching Abacum in a global lockdown.

From competitors collapsing to becoming a category-defining leader. His journey is a reminder that the founders who win aren’t the ones who move the fastest; they’re the ones who understand where speed actually matters. And they’re the ones who build for the long haul.

Listento the full podcast episode to know more, including:

• Julio’s journey proves that cross-disciplinary careers—law, banking, product—build robust pattern recognition that founders can weaponize.
• Abacum was born from deep domain pain, global experience, and a willingness to launch during the worst possible macro environment.
• Y Combinator rewired Julio’s approach to focus, speed, and bottleneck-driven execution, showing that age is never a barrier to founder success.
• Abacum won by out-executing well-funded competitors on product depth, not go-to-market theatrics—because in FP&A, product is the actual moat.
• Julio’s financing strategy combined discipline, timing, and exceptional early metrics, resulting in repeated preemptive rounds from top global funds.
• His leadership evolution—shifting from outcome obsession to input mastery—became the foundation for building a sustainable, high-performance company.
• Julio’s vision is unapologetically global: Abacum aims to become the uncontested FP&A category leader by building slowly, precisely, and for decades.

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