Blue Onion, a NYC-based subledger used by retail and ecommerce brands, just announced a $10M in Series A funding round. In conjunction with the funding, CEO and co-founder Lyndsey Bunting participated in our Q&A.
FinSMEs: Hi Lyndsey, can you tell us a bit more about yourself? What’s your background?
I initially became interested in finance and accounting through my grandfather and my dad, who were both small business owners. I was inspired by their journeys and excited to follow in their footsteps, so it felt natural to pursue those subjects during my college years at The Wharton School at UPenn. To me, finance and accounting are the “language” of business.
I founded Blue Onion in May of 2020, during the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic. I had been working as VP of Finance at Birchbox, where I observed accounting teams dealing with the same issues time and time again – costly, complex and time-consuming processes to obtain clean and accurate financial data. This also came up while I was doing consulting work for other direct-to-consumer brands, helping them build out their accounting and finance functions. I knew there had to be a better way.
At first, I set my sights on Y Combinator (YC) to get the project off the ground in 2019, but it didn’t stick the first go around. The stars eventually aligned, though. My co-founders, Charley McMillan and Manav Malhotra, happened to be in New York City at the same time in 2020. We had breakfast on a whim and I brought up my concept for Blue Onion. We decided to aim for YC again. We had no customers, no product. It was just the three of us, but we got accepted into YC and then COVID lockdowns happened. So we rented a house down in Charlotte so that the three of us could work in person. We did that for months. It was an incredible experience. We knew we were onto something when we asked, “if we built this, would you sign a contract?” We got five “yes” responses and realized there’s something here! Complete strangers are willing to sign on to this product because the pain points we’re solving for are real.
FinSMEs: Let’s speak about Blue Onion. What is the market problem you want to solve? What is the real opportunity?
We are empowering companies with accessible, accurate and actionable financial data. For the first time, we are allowing companies to close their books daily instead of struggling at month and year end. Blue Onion is making financial information less intimidating and more actionable. The focus is on reconciliation, booking entries and clean data. I truly believe reconciliation is essential for ensuring that financial data is accurate and trustworthy, which allows organizations to make informed decisions. Booking entries correctly is crucial for maintaining the integrity of financial records, as errors can lead to significant discrepancies and misinterpretations of a company’s financial health.
Clean data serves as the foundation for effective financial analysis and reporting, enabling teams to derive actionable insights and improve overall business performance. There is a huge opportunity for AI in this space– currently, many companies are too blocked by bad data to even use AI. We provide the clean data needed to truly automate and get outcomes you can trust.
FinSMEs: What are the features differentiating the product from competitors?
It’s all in our approach to building finance and accounting tools. Data cleanliness and accuracy are at the foundation of our product. I remember the first couple customers that we had; I would log into every instance of the application and I would manually check all of the journal entries.
That’s essentially how we did QA, and that was such an important piece because the idea was, which I think is still true, is that if people can’t trust the data, they can’t trust the product. The data needs to be correct before anything else.
Reconciliation and data cleanliness are what make us different. We built a repository of clean financial data ready for GAAP financial statements. We take responsibility for data correctness at every level, from the source of the data to owning the movement and consolidation of the data, to booking the entries and automating the workflows. It’s a simple idea and it’s hard but we believe that to truly provide value and automate workflows it’s necessary.
FinSMEs: You just raised a new funding round. Please, tell us more about it.
We’re announcing a $10M Series A led by Viola FinTech, bringing our total funding to $17.6M. It includes participation from existing investors YC, Entrée Capital, Green Visor and Vinyl Capital.
We’re excited to use this capital to broaden our reach and to continue to deliver fully reconciled, transaction-level data that’s accurate, auditable and ready for automation.
FinSMEs: Can you share some numbers and achievements for the business?
Of course! We’re proud to have reconciled over $30 billion of transactions to date.
At present, we work with over 200 leading retail and ecommerce brands, including Supergoop!, BarkBox and a.k.a Brands. Another fun fact: We average 99% data accuracy post onboarding.
FinSMEs: What are your medium-term plans?
First, we’d like to expand the number of integrations that we offer, allowing us to provide clean data for more financial statement accounts and to more ledgers. We’re also working on allowing third-party applications to build on top of clean financial data. We’re also hoping to become the clean data financial platform for other consumer verticals and expand geographically to Latin America, Europe, Middle East and Asia.
FinSMEs
16/04/2025