Birdseye View
Welcome to The Haven Newsletter – your weekly read on how modern businesses run their finances. We’ll share practical breakdowns of the numbers that matter, the stories behind them, and how Haven helps founders gain time and financial clarity.
Because too many founders fly blind when it comes to their finances.
The Menu
🪖 What’s New at Haven
Haven Welcomes New Founding GTM:
John Martin (aka "J-Mart" aka "the legend") brings deep finance and GTM experience from scaling fintech startups. At Clearco, he was a founding sales hire and helped take the company from pre-seed to more than $900M in funding, including leading the EMEA launch. He later joined Hyper (Sam Altman–backed, $15M raised), supporting companies in building agent-driven financial workflows. At Haven, he’ll lead sales and customer success as we scale.Félix x Haven Case Study:
Félix, a fintech company making it easier to send money between LATAM and US, cut 30% off their time spent managing finances by switching to Haven. Carlos Reyes, their controller, now reps 100% accurate and audit ready books, making his 3 person finance team feel like 30!
Recap of Haven’s Startup Finances Live Q&A:
We covered the biggest financial mistakes founders make and how to avoid them, plus what Quinn learned from building and selling Autumn AI, and why staying close to your numbers from day zero matters. Daniel, Haven’s very own CPA, broke down the habits, systems, and founder-accountant rhythms that prevent stress, keep financials accurate, and turn accounting from a monthly fire drill into a real strategic advantage.
📈 The State of Startup Finance
Gamma, the AI PowerPoint killer founded by Grant Lee, raised a $68M series B at a $2.1B valuation. Round was led by a16z after breaking $100M in ARR (Business Wire).
Kraken, the crypto trading platform, raised $800M at a $20B valuation, and are currently being linked to an IPO (CNBC).
Span, the developer intelligence platform with clients like Ramp, and Braze, raised $25M to bring clarity to engineering teams (Span).
📚 Hit the Books
The Cash Flow Insight Founders Miss
Most founders track profit. The ones who last track cash.
Cash flow shows whether your business can actually fund itself, not just whether it looks good in a P&L. It’s the clearest view of your burn, your runway, and how your money really moves day to day.
The catch: it only works if you know how to read the three sections that matter — operations, investing, and financing — and review them often.
If you want to avoid surprise cash crunches, extend runway, and make smarter hiring and spend decisions, learning cash flow early is one of the highest-leverage skills you can build as a founder.
💪 Quick Hits
Stat of the Week: Ramp be ramping. The fintech giant raised another $300M led by Lightspeed, capping their valuation at $3.2B (Crunchbase).
CFO Corner: Forbes Finance Council CFOs say the $192.7B AI VC wave exposed that recent flops weren’t hype-driven. They were fundamentals-driven. Valuations need to be tied to real metrics like ARR, profitability, and retention, not flashy demos (Forbes).
Tool Tip: Manual consolidation sucks, especially when you’re managing finances across multiple entities. Haven offers automated consolidation, inter-company tracking, and unified reporting.
If you’re tired of manual consolidations giving you headaches, talk with someone from our team to see how we can help!
🔈 Weekly Limelight
Congratulations to Harry Blumsack and the team at Infera for launching their AI-Native compliance platform for medtech co’s.
🚉 Commuter Content
Because everything is content now, and we wanna share the best of it with you.
It may just be his southern charm, but Todd Graves, CEO and Founder of Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers shared a beauty on obsession, product, and consistency.
There’s a newcomer on the podcast scene, and he’s interviewing some of the greats. Ti Morse pulls off a great session with Shaun Maguire from Sequoia.
Naval on recruiting great talent. Enough said.
🧾 From the Control Room
That’s all for this week.
We’ll be back next time with more ways to keep your books (and your business) in sync.
In the mean time, Haven Blog is firing. Check it out for weekly updates on all things startup finance.