I spent my career in finance. Now I'm building the tools for it.
I graduated in 1996 and qualified as a CA in 1997. After two years with GRUH Finance I joined CBay Systems as its first employee in India. Eight years after that, as Group CFO, we listed it on London's AIM market. By then we were the third largest in the world.
In 2008 I started SuperCFO and brought the fractional CFO to India. Today I am building FinPera, an AI-native system of record and system of work for finance, across companies, professionals in practice and investors. I designed the product, and I direct the agents that build it.
ScaleUp Summit · Financial Express
What I believe
Four things I keep arguing for.
A file you build once should still work in ten years
Input cells and formula cells separated, colour coded, formatted, structured. Whether it is a simple schedule or an acquisition model for a fund raise, it takes longer the first time and it saves years afterwards. People still tell me they are running files I built for them a decade ago. That habit is the whole of how I think about systems, and it is what FinPera is.
Ethics is what you do, not what you report
It is easy to write the word into a report. What it actually means is being responsible to everyone with a stake in the business, being fair and transparent in how you deal with them, and being diligent in the ordinary work nobody is watching. I wrote a white paper on exactly this in 2010 and the Chairman of SEBI released it. Nothing since has changed my mind.
A finance executive does not belong to one industry
I stopped believing that in 2008. Manufacturing, SaaS, healthcare, retail, D2C, trading, services. Family businesses, bootstrapped founders, PE and VC-backed companies, MNCs, and the investors on the other side of the table. Not as an advisor sending notes in. As a CFO inside the business.
Finance software should be worth looking at
Most of the finance and accounting software I have come across was built by engineers rather than by finance people, and it shows. It handles the accounting and stops there. Very little of it gives a CFO the insight the job actually needs, proper FP&A is usually missing altogether, and some of the most widely used packages have an interface nobody appears to have thought about. Security and controls are not negotiable. Neither is functionality. But after that, what a thing is like to use is not a detail. People spend their working lives in those screens.
What I work on
AI, with a CFO's guardrails.
I designed FinPera around a question I could answer from three sides: what would I want from this platform as a CFO, as a professional advisor, and as an investor? Those three rarely want the same thing, and most finance software is built for only one of them.
I have never been on the outside of these systems. At CBay I built the MIS, the dashboards and the executive reporting, and ran a small software team on billing and automation. Since 2008 I have reviewed finance systems at hundreds of companies, and been called in more than once when an implementation had already gone wrong.
Since early 2025 I have stopped specifying software and started building it. I do not type the code any more — agents do, and I direct them, review what comes back and send it back when it is wrong. Underneath, FinPera is multi-tenant and enterprise-grade, with real permissions, tenant isolation and audit trails.
It means that when I say something about AI and finance, it is at least something I have built, tested, and got wrong a few times first. The question was never what to automate. It was which decisions have to stay with a person.
What I run
Two businesses, eighteen years apart.
Co-Founder and CEO · building since 2025 · India & USA
An AI-native system of record and system of work for finance, built for companies, professionals in practice and investors. Multi-tenant and enterprise-grade, with real permissions, tenant isolation and audit trails. I designed the product and build it with my co-founder Jay. We built through 2025 and incorporated in May 2026, in India and the USA.
- AI for finance teams
- Professionals in practice
- ICAI AIS 2026
Founder and CEO · since 2008
A CFO practice. We were among the first in India to offer the fractional CFO, and have since worked with hundreds of companies from pre-seed startups to PE-backed and listed businesses. It runs on a team of CFOs who do most of the real work.
- Fractional and interim CFOs
- Transactions
- Finance function build-out
Writing
Recent articles
In 2021 we released Shrimad Rajchandra, India's first Gujarati animated feature film. I directed it, and worked on the strategy, planning and distribution. We built our own studio, scored it as an orchestral fusion rather than a Bollywood soundtrack, and sold whole shows instead of seats.
I mentor entrepreneurs and family business owners on strengthening a business through its finance function, and on building a decision-making process that runs on good information. I have sat in rooms with three generations of the same family, working out a path that aligns everyone's interests, separates the emotion from the logic, and leaves behind something scalable and process-driven.
Written about
Elsewhere
- theCFOai An independent review of the Super CFO GPT
- Business Today Freelance CFOs come to rescue of small companies
- The Global Analyst An exclusive interview on building the virtual CFO model
- YourStory Bhairav Kothari, Founder, SuperCFO
- The Times of India Mumbai rushes to watch the biopic on Shrimad Rajchandra
- ET CFO Can an economic slowdown boost demand for outsourced CFOs?
- Financial Express Entrepreneurs must keep emotions out of business
- Rediff You can pay this CFO by the hour
- Hindustan Times On building a finance function that scales
- Business Standard India's first Gujarati animated movie set to take the US market by storm
- IMDb Shrimad Rajchandra · Director
New articles, by email
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