FOUNDER
Who is Wilfried Eyi?

Wil was born in Gabon, in Central West Africa. At 10 or 11, he was already tinkering with how businesses ran—spending a summer in a family friend’s auto body shop, building their entire back office in Excel because “you need to run this better.”

Entrepreneurship wasn’t the obvious path.

In Gabon, he barely knew anyone who had started their own company. But the seeds were there: curiosity about how small businesses really work, and a comfort with technology thanks to his mother, a software engineer who wrote in COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language). He still remembers when the first 1GB server arrived in his country.

At 15, he finished his baccalaureate. At 16, he moved to the US alone. He didn’t speak English. He had to learn the language, navigate a new culture, and start college—all at once.

Eventually, he made his way to BYU, originally on a path toward an MD/PhD. The plan: solve rare diseases in Africa and open clinics. Then a friend nudged him toward finance, and something clicked. He realized that building up economies might create more impact at scale than his original plan.

He switched into finance and headed to Goldman Sachs in NYC.

From there, he joined Warburg Pincus, a ~$80B global private equity fund. Despite the scale of the institutions, he worked on small teams—three to seven people—getting deep exposure to how companies are run. At Warburg, he really started learning from entrepreneurs: sitting in board meetings, watching operators build, scale, and make hard tradeoffs with real capital at stake.

He went to Harvard Business School expecting to stay on the investing track. Instead, HBS became a staging ground to jump to the other side of the table.

He started building.

First came a labor marketplace that grew ~30% week-over-week for months before COVID and other factors forced a rethink. Next, a fintech platform for construction contractors. That’s where he met his now co-founder; together they built a ledger product and got hands-on experience designing financial infrastructure from scratch.

By then, the pattern was clear:

• Deep exposure to CFOs and financial workflows from Goldman and Warburg

• Firsthand experience building financial tools for real-world operators

• A growing conviction that AI could reshape how finance teams work

Payflow is the product of that arc.

COMPANY
Payflow

After winding down the construction-focused fintech, Wil and his co-founder took a step back and asked: where is the real, unsolved pain in the office of the CFO?

They looked at everything—core accounting, payables, receivables, bookkeeping. The pattern they kept seeing: CFOs and finance leaders drowning in the same repetitive analytics every month, spread across too many systems, with too little time left to think strategically.

The result is Payflow: an AI copilot for FP&A and strategic finance.

In Wil’s framing, the “office of the CFO” has three pillars:

1. Core accounting – your system of record (think: what Rillet is reimagining)

2. FinOps / financial operations – how money moves (Ramp, Tabs, etc.)

3. FP&A & strategic finance – forecasting, budgeting, reporting, scenario planning

Payflow is laser-focused on that third pillar: turning the mass of financial and operational data into live, usable insight—and doing the day-to-day analytical work that eats finance teams alive.

Problem & Solution

The problem:

Every month, finance teams repeat the same grind:

• Budget vs. actuals

• Variance analysis

• Scenario planning and re-forecasts

• Board packages and internal reporting

• Ad hoc questions from the CEO on unit economics, cohorts, or payback

The data to answer those questions lives across ERPs, CRMs, HRIS, and data warehouses. Stitching it together is slow, manual, and error-prone. Highly trained analysts spend dozens of hours copying, pasting, cleaning, and reformatting instead of partnering with leadership on strategy.

Wil’s diagnosis: the tools CFOs use today don’t behave like a smart analyst. They’re static, fragmented, and built for record-keeping, not decision-making.

What Payflow does:

Payflow plugs into the core systems a finance org already uses:

• ERP / core accounting

• CRM

• Data warehouse

• HRIS and other operational data sources

On top of that connected data layer, Payflow unleashes Luca: “Your AI finance analyst saving you 400+ hours and thousands of dollars on FP&A, Strategic Finance and Reporting”

• Automates core reporting workflows – budget variance, flux analysis, recurring management and board reports

• Surfaces insights across systems – so answering “real” business questions doesn’t mean hand-stitching spreadsheets every time

• Supports scenario planning and strategic finance work – helping CFOs and their teams explore the future, not just repackage the past

The impact: work that used to take dozens of analyst hours can be collapsed into about an hour of review and iteration—with Payflow doing the heavy lifting and the humans focusing on judgment.

Product & Workflow

Payflow is designed to meet finance teams where they already live.

• Excel-first experience: An Excel plugin lets users keep their existing models and workflows, while Payflow’s agents fetch data, refresh assumptions, and help structure analyses.

• Presentation-ready outputs: PowerPoint and Google Slides support are on the roadmap, so the same “copilot” that helped build the numbers can help build the narrative.

• Google Sheets support: For teams that prefer Sheets as their modeling or collaboration surface, Payflow will plug in there too.

• Native UX for end-to-end workflows: Beyond plugins, Payflow has a dedicated interface where finance teams can define and run entire workflows, build interactive dashboards or create robust reports.

The vision is that CFOs and their teams can:

• Centralize scenarios, budgets, and forecasts on the platform

• Run and re-run scenarios without juggling five different files

• Treat Payflow like an always-on, context-aware finance analyst who knows the company’s data and the CFO’s playbook

ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)

Payflow is built for companies where finance is a strategic function and complexity is real:

• Companies with $50M-500M+ in revenue or fast-growing companies with $5-50M in revenue

• Finance orgs that run recurring, sophisticated reporting and forecasting

• CFOs and strategic finance leaders who sit at the center of planning and decision-making

• Teams already working with modern tools in the office of the CFO stack (Rillet for accounting, Ramp or other finops tools, modern data stacks, etc.)

These are teams that:

• Have enough data and complexity that manual reporting is breaking

• Are already trusted partners to the CEO and board—but are stuck in spreadsheets too much of the time

• Care about precision and control, but are ready to offload the repetitive work to an AI copilot

For them, Payflow is not another dashboard. It’s a way to scale a lean finance team without hiring an army of analysts.

GTM: Outbound-Heavy, Learning-First

Despite sitting in a massive market, Payflow’s go-to-market motion is intentionally focused and outbound-heavy—especially in this early phase.

A few core pillars:

• Heavy outbound for learning: Early on, Wil and team prioritize talking directly to CFOs and finance leaders. The goal isn’t just to sell—it’s to deeply understand how they describe their pain, how they define success, and where current tools fall short.

• Conferences and direct conversations: They’re active in finance and SaaS ecosystems, building relationships and iterating the product from live feedback loops.

• Emerging inbound flywheel: Since around November, consistent content and presence on LinkedIn has started to pay off. Inbound interest now represents companies with combined revenues in the tens of billions.

By volume, outbound still dominates:

• ~90% of opportunities by count are outbound

• But by revenue potential, inbound is already ~30% and growing—larger, more sophisticated companies are reaching out after seeing Payflow’s positioning and early integrations.

The early flagship example: a $100M+ revenue company that switched to Rillet for accounting and became a Payflow customer. To support them, Payflow integrated with Rillet and, working in a shared Slack channel, had the customer live in about 10 days.

That Rillet integration is a template: meet the customer where they are, plug into the core accounting system, and then expand the relationship by becoming the analytics and planning layer atop it.

The Future of Payflow

Wil’s one-year vision is clear: Payflow becomes the default third leg of the modern office-of-the-CFO stool:

1. Rillet (or similar) for core accounting

2. Ramp / finops platforms for how money moves

3. Payflow for analytics, forecasting, budgeting, and strategic planning

To get there, the roadmap is focused on:

• Deep scenario planning – Easily modeling multiple futures, stress-testing plans, and rerunning scenarios as inputs change

• Forecast benchmarking and reforecasting – Turning forecasting into a continuous, data-driven process instead of a quarterly fire drill

• End-to-end workflow automation – Allowing teams to codify the steps required to produce an analysis, so Payflow can execute the bulk of them

• Centralized modeling environment – Housing scenarios, budgets, and forecasts directly in Payflow so teams don’t have to manage a web of fragile spreadsheets

The end state: finance teams treat Payflow as an extension of the team—an always-on strategic finance analyst embedded in their stack, speaking their language, and connected to their real data.

Why Wil Stands Out

Spending time with Wil, a few throughlines emerge:

• He runs toward the hard path. Leaving Gabon at 16 without English, switching from MD/PhD plans to high finance, then walking away from a top-tier investing track to build from zero—these are not comfort moves.

• He compounds learning in stages. Small teams at Goldman and Warburg, deep exposure to boardrooms and operators, followed by multiple startup cycles (labor marketplace, fintech ledger, Payflow) give him a rare blend of institutional rigor and startup scrappiness.

• He’s obsessed with real operator pain. Payflow wasn’t born in a vacuum. It came from years of watching CFOs and finance teams grind through the same manual workflows—and from building financial tools for contractors and other non-glamorous segments where reliability matters.

• He thinks in systems across the entire CFO stack. He doesn’t see Payflow as a point tool. He sees it as the analytics and strategy layer that sits alongside core accounting and finops, plugging into any system that can provide clean, fresh data.

• He’s not trying to replace finance teams. The goal isn’t a “CFO in a box.” It’s an AI copilot that does the repetitive, cross-system analysis so humans can spend more time in boardrooms, strategy sessions, and conversations that actually shape the business.

If you run a modern finance org—especially in a company where data is rich, complexity is high, and your team is lean—Payflow is quickly becoming one of the sharpest tools you can add to your stack.

And if you’re early in your own founder or strategic finance journey, Wil is exactly the kind of investor‑turned‑operator‑turned‑founder whose path is worth studying—and whose approach to the office of the CFO is likely a preview of where the function is headed.

TL;DR

From Gabon to Goldman and Warburg, through multiple startup cycles, and now founding Payflow, Wil Eyi is building an AI copilot that helps CFOs and finance teams automate the repetitive reporting grind and focus on the strategic decisions that drive the business.

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