Intro Video: The one’s behind the one’s

The Systemic Failure

On a grey August morning in 2025, traders watched in disbelief as WH Smith’s stock went into free fall. By the closing bell, nearly half the company’s market value had vanished, billions erased in a single trading session. There was no fraud scandal, no catastrophic product recall, no shocking lawsuit. ‍

The culprit was far more ordinary, and in some ways more alarming: An accounting error. ‍

A minor oversight, buried deep in the company’s financial systems, cascaded into a billion-dollar market crisis.

It wasn’t the first time. Lazard’s accidental $400M discount of SolarCity, Peloton’s $100M inventory miscount and Wirecard’s phantom billions all remind us that in today’s economy, the weakest link isn’t always strategy or execution - it’s Finance & Accounting.

Finance is the nervous system of every enterprise. It guides decisions, manages risk, and anchors trust. And yet, the infrastructure that powers it hasn’t meaningfully changed in decades.

The cracks are widening. A global talent shortage has left CFOs with twice as many open roles as last year. Closes stretch longer, errors multiply, and burnout spikes. Finance leaders tell us they spend more time moving numbers between systems than steering the business itself.

At the same time, a shift is underway. After years of scepticism, finance leaders are moving from caution to conviction on AI, not because it’s trendy, but because the alternative is collapse. The industry doesn’t just need another tool. It requires a command centre.

That’s why we’re backing Maximor AI.

For most people, these failures are headlines. For Ramnandan Krishnamurthy, they were closer to home. 

The son of a CFO, he grew up with a front-row seat to the pressure and accuracy required in finance. Years later, alongside his colleague Ajay Krishna Amudan, he would channel that perspective into a company designed to prevent these cracks from ever widening again.

Ramnandan K & Ajay Krishna : From the Dorms of IIT Madras to Microsoft Cubicles to founders who are building on Large dreams (aka BOLD).

On one side of campus at IIT Madras, a young researcher was reshaping not just machine learning models but himself. Ramnandan Krishnamurthy grew up with a chip on his shoulder, shaped by experiences that would have crushed many.
Bullied for being overweight, Ram decided early that he would take control of his own narrative.

He trained with intensity, transformed himself physically, and in the process, built an inner engine that would power everything he did after. 

At IITM, that same drive showed up in the lab. He wasn’t chasing grades; he was chasing the frontier. His thesis on deep learning, co-authored with Aravind Srinivas (now founder of Perplexity), was published at ICML ’16. He graduated with a near-perfect 9.75 GPA, blending deep technical rigour with commercial instincts. Before most of his batchmates had picked jobs, Ram had already built and sold his first startup, Fastnext, to ANSR. At Microsoft, he took it a step further, leading finance transformation programs as a forward-deployed architect, bringing Azure into Fortune 500 environments such as Coca-Cola and Walmart. Always a few steps ahead, always carrying the weight of lived experience, Ram knew what it meant to build trust in systems that could never afford to break.

Across campus, another mind was in motion, raw, relentless, and operating at elite velocity. Ajay Krishna Amudan was a force. He founded the IIT-M Programming Club, led India’s team to the ACM-ICPC World Finals in Marrakesh, and had already garnered accolades such as the IMO and ICPC by the time he turned 20.

But Ajay wasn’t just a prodigy. He was a builder with exceptional mental and operational endurance. At Microsoft, he joined a small team working on internal finance systems. As billing complexity grew with the introduction of new product models, Ajay helped rearchitect the entire engine, transforming it from a fragile prototype into a platform that manages over $200B+ in annual revenue. He was not just a founding engineer; he became the founding architect of Microsoft’s global billing platform.Ajay doesn’t posture. He reasons. In one of our earliest conversations, I made a passing reference to a "$1B opportunity." He pushed back not with ego, but with clarity: this wasn’t a billion-dollar idea; this was a new category, a decacorn in the making. That ambition, matched with his calm analytical force, is rare. When Ajay locks into a problem, there’s no flinch, no fatigue, only forward.

After IIT, years later, Ram and Ajay’s paths crossed again at Microsoft, and this journey became the foundation of Maximor.

BoldCap x (Ram + Ajay)

Sometimes the proper introductions don’t feel planned; they feel inevitable. A friend connected me to two IIT-M classmates who went on to become key operators at Microsoft, handling large strategic projects. I walked into that first meeting not knowing where it would lead. I walked out, realising I had just met the founders I’d been looking for, but patience was the name of the game.

We met Ram and Ajay in the middle of their idea maze. What stood out wasn’t just their intensity, but their ability to turn every pivot into momentum. Each iteration brought them closer to the Bold Idea.

Idea Maze to Finance: Finding the Decacorn Opportunity to build a Finance Command Centre for the Enterprise.

When I first met Ram and Ajay, the destination was not immediately obvious. We spent hours at whiteboards, chasing ideas from marketing tech to tax to workflow automation, each pivot less a failure, more proof of their intensity and speed of learning.

Finance revealed itself gradually, but once it did, the fit was undeniable. Ram carried the perspective of someone who grew up with the understanding of numbers, being the son of a CFO at a public company. Ajay had the precision of a world-class engineer, an ICPC world finalist who rebuilt Microsoft’s finance platform to handle $200B+ in revenue. Together, they combined deep technical rigour with the ability to get into the customer’s shoes as forward-deployed engineers way before the term was even. 

What stood out was their mix of naivety, ambition, and discipline. They didn’t posture as experts; they treated finance as a system to be learned and rebuilt from the ground up. That learnability, paired with Ram’s customer obsession and Ajay’s insistence on grounded technology, became their edge.

This wasn’t a billion-dollar problem. Done right, it was a $10B+ category. And Ram and Ajay were the kind of founders who could unlock it, not by having every answer on day one, but by learning faster than anyone else and staying locked on the customer until the solution emerged.

‍The first navigation victories that they charted were:

• Proptech business Rently, with global operations across three countries, cut its month-end close from 8 days to 4 within the first month of using Maximor, while avoiding two incremental accounting hires for repetitive work.
  
• Multi-billion AUM registered investment advisor business Invst was able to automate reconciliations, allocations, and reporting, unlocking advisor-level profitability insights that were previously impractical.

The World of Finance: A Forgotten Kingdom

For decades, the kingdom of finance has lived in shadows. Its heroes, CFOs, controllers, and accountants carry the burden of every decision, yet remain unseen. They are tasked to guide the destiny of companies, but shackled by broken systems.

The villains here are not people, but forces:

• Fragmented systems that scatter data across ERPs, CLMs, Billing systems, internal spreadsheets and others with no central context, making true automation impossible.
  
• Point solutions that promise automation but deliver more complexity.
  
• These legacy systems are rigid. They take forever to set up. And the moment you try to do things your way, they break. They weren’t built for flexibility, and any changes you need to make require spending twice as much on SI partners to modify and maintain the software.

The battles are endless. Every close is a war, every audit a trial, every restatement an earthquake that shakes markets and destroys trust.

The Rise of New Champions

From within the maze of ledgers and spreadsheets, a new force emerged. Maximor was not built as another finance tool; it was designed as a command centre, charting the course forward. It unifies data, deploys AI agents, and embeds trust at the core,  turning chaos into coordinates and numbers into navigation.

Where legacy systems buried finance in mechanics, Maximor sets them free. Where audits once struck fear, they now arrive by default, like lighthouses guiding ships home. Where finance was once a cost centre, it is now the cockpit of decision-making, steering the enterprise forward.

The Maximor’s Promise

Every rebellion needs a promise, not just to win battles, but to change the world that comes after. Maximor’s promise is clear:

• ~40% more team capacity so finance can rise from mechanics to strategy, from back office to the driver’s seat.
  
• Audit-ready by default, turning compliance from a constant risk into a constant strength.
  
• Unified visibility across finance and operations, giving leaders the power to see across silos and make faster, better-informed decisions, with AI reasoning built in.
  

This is the future we see: a finance function that is always-on, always-trusted, and always ready to lead. A system strong enough to prevent past failures and bold enough to make finance the growth engine of every modern company.

From Idea to Escape Velocity

By the time Maximor stepped onto the fundraising stage, the pieces were already in place, product in the hands of customers, a team forged by intensity, and our conviction sharpened by the idea maze. What followed were weeks in the trenches: investor meetings, pitch decks, late-night dinners, each one a test of conviction.

They didn’t walk into the room with just a pitch. They walked in with momentum. And when the dust settled, Maximor emerged with a $9M seed round led by  Foundation Capital ( with our good friend and highly respected investor Ashu Garg), joined by Gaia Ventures (founded by SAP’s former Chief Strategy Officer) and us as BoldCap, who are existing investors.

Alongside them stood some of the most influential builders in tech:
Aravind Srinivas (CEO, Perplexity), Eric Yuan (CEO, Zoom), Tien Tzuo (CEO, Zuora), and CFOs and finance leaders from Ramp, Gusto, Opendoor, MongoDB, and the Big Four accounting firms.

This round wasn’t just capital. It was a call to arms, a coalition of operators and investors who share the belief that this is more than just rewriting software. It’s rewriting finance itself.

This, for us, is BOLD -  Building on Large Dreams.

Know more about Maximor Here -> https://www.maximor.ai/

Read our AI Manifesto here -> https://www.boldcap.com/ai-manifesto

‍