The story
Your board pack says one thing. Your transactions may say another.
Every business keeps two records of itself: what the operation does, and what finance writes down about it. The money, and the truth, live where they disagree. This is how I found that gap in a fast-growing business, and why Brightmere exists to find it in yours.
Early 2025
The setting
I was the data scientist at a fast-growing B2B commerce platform, connecting consumer-goods brands to tens of thousands of small retailers, and preparing for investment. Revenue had more than doubled year on year. The deck, the accounts and the forecast all said the same thing, because they were built from the same numbers.
My job was to find commercial signal in the platform's transactions. The first thing I did was the thing nobody had done: I ran the cohorts.
Two records of the same business
Growth
- Revenue more than doubling year on year
- A growing customer count on every board slide
- The deck, the accounts and the forecast all telling the same story
Churn
- Most of the growth came from customers acquired that quarter
- Cohort by cohort, most of them did not come back
- The curve was being refilled from the top, not compounding from the base
“The headline was true. The business underneath it was different.”
What changed
Nobody had hidden anything, and finance had recorded every sale correctly. The gap was a missing join: the ledger knew how much was sold, the platform knew who bought it and whether they came back, and no one had put the two side by side.
Once they were, the questions changed. Not “how fast are we growing” but “which customers stay, and what does it cost to replace the ones who leave”. Targeting moved from gut feel to the transactions, a national pricing change was decided on a controlled experiment instead of an argument, and leadership walked into the investment conversations knowing what the cohorts showed, with the answer ready.
Why I built Brightmere
I had seen the same gap from the other side. I trained in accounting and started out in corporate finance, so I knew how the ledger gets built: the real world happens, it is recorded, reconciled, closed and reported, and only then does anyone interpret it. Finance is a translation of operations. It is monthly, it is lagging, and it averages away the thing you most need to see.
Brightmere is the join between the two records, done for £5-50m businesses. Operations connected to finance at the transaction, so the numbers you run the business on are the numbers that survive diligence. For the people running it, and for the people about to buy, back or lend to it.
Which of your two records is right?
A 30-minute call is enough to tell you whether yours disagree, and where. No pitch deck, no follow-up sequence.