The world runs on spreadsheets—and for all the AI talk, Excel still holds the line. But that might be about to change. Tracelight, a London-founded startup aiming to turbocharge financial modelling with generative AI, just raised $3.6 million in seed funding to do exactly that.

The round was led by Chalfen Ventures, with backing from Acequia Capital, Inovo, and Entrepreneur First, plus high-profile angels including Charlie Songhurst (ex-Microsoft) and Suhit Gupta (ex-CIO at General Atlantic and Carlyle).

The AI Revolution Comes for Excel

Tracelight is going after one of the most stubbornly analog corners of modern finance: the Excel spreadsheet. For decades, analysts and consultants have relied on spreadsheets to model everything from mergers and acquisitions to multi-billion-dollar investment strategies. Despite the buzz around AI and automation, most of this work still happens the old-fashioned way—with formulas, manual formatting, and hours of spreadsheet wrangling.

Enter Tracelight. The company’s tech translates traditional spreadsheet logic into a format large language models (LLMs) can understand—effectively allowing AI to read, interpret, and collaborate on Excel models. It’s not just about writing formulas faster; Tracelight lets users validate models, debug errors, and run complex analyses using natural language prompts.

And it does all of this inside Excel itself, via a Microsoft-approved add-in—no retraining required, no new platforms to learn.

More Time Thinking, Less Time Clicking

According to early users—primarily analysts at investment banks, PE firms, and strategy consultancies—Tracelight can reduce the time spent on repetitive modelling tasks by over 90%. Tasks like formatting, building standard analyses, or finding broken logic are handed off to the AI, freeing up analysts to focus on the more nuanced, judgment-based aspects of financial decision-making.

“Tracelight is purpose-built for this,” says CEO and co-founder Peter Fuller, a former McKinsey consultant. “Our users act as directors and orchestrators of AI that is quickly becoming superhuman at the task of Excel analysis.”

That’s a bold claim—but it’s grounded in a real shift happening across the industry. As frontier LLMs become more capable, the race is on to integrate them into workflows where precision and context matter—especially in high-stakes domains like finance.

Why This Matters

Excel may be 40 years old, but it’s still where most of the world’s financial decision-making happens. Despite dozens of startups promising to “kill the spreadsheet,” none have truly replaced it. Tracelight’s approach—augment, not replace—feels far more likely to stick.

Aleksander Misztal, co-founder and CTO (formerly of Jane Street), puts it bluntly:
“For the first time, Excel financial modellers will be able to tap into the power of frontier AI models directly in their existing workflow.”

And with adoption already underway in some of the most demanding modelling environments in finance, Tracelight appears to be doing what many AI startups promise but few deliver: embedding into critical, high-friction workflows without adding more complexity.

A Bigger Bet on Workflow AI

The rise of what investors are calling “workflow-native AI” is a broader trend worth watching. As Mike Chalfen, lead investor in the round, notes:
“The most magical AI tools work at the highest level of abstraction… Tracelight has taken the world’s most widely used modelling platform and embedded AI where it can have immediate impact.”

That’s not just clever product design—it’s strategic. Professionals are more likely to adopt AI when it fits neatly into the tools they already trust. Rather than reinventing the financial modelling wheel, Tracelight is greasing the spokes.

The fresh capital will go toward building out the product, growing the team, and scaling distribution to reach more finance and strategy professionals globally. Tracelight is available today via the Microsoft Add-In Store, targeting solo analysts and consultants first, with an eye toward broader enterprise rollout.

For a sector that has long treated AI as a curiosity rather than a core tool, Tracelight might be the bridge between legacy workflows and the AI-powered future of financial decision-making.

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