“AI can build models and run analysis and create reports much faster and much better than any human,” Didi Gurfinkel, the company’s cofounder and CEO, told Fortune in an interview. “So all these tools that focused on creating tools for people, for humans—they’re not relevant anymore. The opposite. They limit the AI.”
It’s a provocative claim from a decade-old company that made its name solving what Gurfinkel calls “Excel hell”—the challenge of managing the sprawl of spreadsheets that finance departments rely on for budgeting, forecasting, and reporting. Datarails built a platform that consolidated data from accounting systems, HR platforms, CRMs, and other operational software into a single source of truth, then connected that data to the Excel models that finance teams already used. Datarails, which is based in Tel Aviv, Israel, has raised $175 million in venture capital funding to date, including a $70 million Series C funding round in January.
But the arrival of generative AI, Gurfinkel said, has changed what’s possible—and what’s needed. AI models can generate sophisticated financial analyses in seconds, but chief financial officers can’t simply throw their data into ChatGPT or Claude and trust the output.
