Shortly after Dan Barzily became CFO of Tipalti, a go-to-market transformation altered the company’s working-capital profile. One quarter later, Barzily tells us, the company missed its forecast across multiple parts of the P&L.
The surprise reached back to a subject he had barely considered since his university accounting class. “It really hit me,” Barzily recalls. “I’m now the CFO, and I’m in charge of those things.”
Until his appointment, Barzily says, he had never expected to become a CFO. He studied engineering, where he developed skills in analytics, accuracy, modeling, forecasting, and making assumptions about the future. According to Barzily, consulting then taught him to work with people ranging from individual contributors to company executives, while business development exposed him to dealmaking, legal matters, contracts, and the many participants required to bring something to life.
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At Tipalti, Barzily says, the chief-of-staff role initially involved running executive-team agendas, surfacing important decisions, assigning action items, and sometimes playing “bad cop.” As he learned the business, he began initiating programs and eventually owned pricing, the data organization, and strategy for centers of excellence outside the United States and in Tel Aviv. That expansion, he explains, moved him into the chief strategy officer role.
Barzily describes a career as something that is “not linear.” People build, try their best, produce results, and—if the right people notice—receive larger opportunities. His working-capital surprise added another turn to that path: the moment when a strategic operator encountered the full weight of the CFO’s agenda.
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CFOTL: What does the platform provide? Tell us about it. Who needs it? Where is the opportunity now?
Barzily: Tipalti is the global leader in finance automation for mid-market companies. “Mid-market company” is a fuzzy definition. I don’t think there’s an academic definition for what a mid-market company is. The way we define mid-market companies is that, on the one hand, their challenges as they pertain to finance automation are complex.
They are global, they are growing, they have multiple entities, and they have to comply with various regulatory frameworks. They have employees all over the world and suppliers all over the world. It’s complicated.
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On the other hand, they don’t have the time and resources to absorb a heavy solution to solve those complex challenges. They’re pretty much left in the middle because the SMB solutions will not cut it, and the enterprise solutions are too heavy. You are talking about seven figures just to bring in an integration team before you even start using it. That’s where we come in.
Our goal is to bring enterprise-grade capabilities to finance leaders in the mid-market in a way that they can digest them, use them, and enjoy them. Our product strategy, in three words, is breadth, depth, and simplicity.
Breadth, because a finance leader in a mid-market company wants to consolidate vendors to solve multiple pain points: AP, expenses, procurement, and treasury. That’s on the breadth side.
On the depth side, as I said, it’s not your corner coffee shop. The solution has to have a level of depth to actually deliver the value. And simplicity, because of the time and resources needed to implement and digest the solution in a way that allows customers to realize the value.
At a high level, this is what we do. This is a journey we have been on for the past 15 years of the company’s existence, and we are still on it.
With AI, I think finance and accounting are no different from most professions. AI is revolutionizing the way work is being done. We are already seeing it, and this trend will only intensify over time, with humans doing some of the work and agents doing different parts of the work.
I would say most of the company’s resources nowadays are invested in an AI transformation. A little bit more about Tipalti: We have over 6,500 customers. We are reaching $100 billion in annual TPV. TPV is the remittance that we process annually. We are growing strongly and surpassed $200 million in ARR in 2025.
The opportunity ahead of us—it was part of your question—is huge. The mid-market is a very large market, and the kind of solution we deliver, which is really end-to-end automation, is not well penetrated yet. There is a lot of room on the S-curve to continue to climb, and we’re climbing.
Tipalti | www.tipalti.com | Foster City, CA