When Isaac (Paul) Heller , an American haredi Jew and one of Trullion’s two founders, arrived in Israel with his wife, he planned on just a one-year stay. In college he studied history, but found himself working on the accounting staff of a large and well-known New York firm. After about a year in Israel, Heller and his wife decided to stay. Heller relates that in the morning he would study at a yeshiva in Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim, and in the evening he would think about the system he wanted to build.
In late 2019, with an early-stage product, he managed to raise angel investment funding. In 2020, venture capital fund Aleph entered the picture. Aleph led a $3.5 million seed funding round for Heller and his product as SMRT, a side-project that became Trullion . The company's operations then moved to Tel Aviv where a connection was made between Heller and Amir Boldo , a secular Israeli, who served in the IDF 8200 signals intelligence unit, and had been Senior VP R&D at Silverfort, and VP Innovation at DriveNets. They discovered a shared vision: to optimize the use of artificial intelligence in accounting. "Amir and I have both experienced working with companies, especially accounting firms, where the sense is that you’re paying but not getting the service you deserve," says Heller. "We want to produce a higher standard in this area."
Adding color
This meeting and the pair’s common vision gave birth to the company in its current incarnation, Trullion, a combination of "truth" and "million." The company is developing a platform for the accounting industry that facilitates automatic management of financial processes, and control and detection of errors, using artificial intelligence. Among other things, it can be fed with a range of different document formats, whether Excel, PDF, or handwritten texts, and generate reports based on them. The two decided to harness artificial intelligence - the global tech industry’s hottest buzzword over the last year - and inject it into an industry often considered gray and boring. "What many people don't understand is that accounting is the language of the entire world, not just the financial world. In the end, the truth is in the numbers," they say.
The two maintain that they recognized AI’s potential long before the current hype. "The financial side at companies today is still like the Wild West. It looks that way partly because the financial information is split into different systems," explains Heller. "We provide an automation platform to both sides: the people preparing financial reports within the enterprise, and the people entrusted with auditing the reports of those organizations."
Complementary opposites
The two describe themselves as complementary opposites of a sort. The haredi Heller brings American corporate culture, while Boldo, a "secular heretic" he says jokingly, brings innovation and Israeli sabra "hutzpah ." The two even share an office with Boldo sitting at his desk and Heller working next to him at a standing desk. The diversity is also reflected among the employees, they note. "We have quite a few new immigrants who’ve joined the team, and we speak English at the office, which is fairly unique. We have an office in New York and we’re going to open a European location shortly."
As far as the two entrepreneurs are concerned, the competition comes from those customers loyal to Excel. Heller says, "Amir and I share the same philosophy about artificial intelligence; it’s a means of optimizing the enterprise. With it, we solve a universal problem based on a universal language - the language of finance."
To date, Trullion has raised $34 million. The last funding round was announced in April of last year, with $19 million raised. Today, the company has a staff of 75, of which 60 are in Israel. All credit is due, the founders say, to their employees: "We have a very strong team, people who have been with us for several years. Along with the feeling that we’re constantly continuing to build the company, we feel we’re also building the next stage of leadership in the company and in the field."
Trullion took fourth place in the "Globes" Most Promising Startups of 2024 rankings.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on May 7, 2024.
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd., 2024.