Outpoll | London startup Ascentra Labs raises $2M to automate consulting Excel work with AI

AIenterprise aiAI in Finance and Banking

While the legal and accounting sectors have been reshaped by billion-dollar AI ventures, the $250 billion global consulting industry has remained a stubbornly analog holdout, its workflows still deeply entrenched in manual spreadsheet manipulation. A London-based startup, Ascentra Labs, is now placing a $2 million bet on cracking this resistant market, targeting the very Excel drudgery that defines a junior consultant's existence.Founded by former McKinsey consultants, the company has secured seed funding led by Berlin's NAP Ventures, with backing from notable angels like Revolut's former CRO Alan Chang and Voi CEO Fredrik Hjelm. This investment, modest by the frothy standards of enterprise AI, underscores a calculated gamble: that extreme focus on a narrow, painful problem—specifically, the analysis of survey data in private equity due diligence—can succeed where broader, more ambitious AI solutions have repeatedly failed to gain traction.The core insight driving Ascentra comes from the firsthand experience of its CEO, Paritosh Devbhandari, who worked in McKinsey's QuantumBlack AI division. He observed that even at elite firms, consultants spend countless late nights manually coding and analyzing survey responses in Excel, a repetitive task that forms the backbone of investment due diligence but has somehow escaped meaningful automation.This gap between the industry's high-tech image and its ground-level reality presented the opportunity. The disparity in AI adoption between law and consulting is instructive.Legal tech has flourished because its work is largely textual, a domain where modern large language models excel. Consulting, by contrast, is a multimodal nightmare, juggling PowerPoint, Excel, and Word documents filled with tabular, graphical, and textual data.This complexity, combined with glacial enterprise sales cycles and exacting security demands, has created a formidable barrier to entry. Ascentra's strategy is to bypass these broad challenges through ruthless specificity.By concentrating solely on survey analysis for private equity deals—a workflow that is relatively standardized and repeatable—the company builds a deterministic engine. It uses OpenAI's GPT models for initial data interpretation but crucially relies on verifiable Python scripts for the core analysis, outputting traceable Excel formulas to eliminate the hallucination risk that would be fatal in billion-dollar transactions.This hybrid approach aims to deliver the 100% fidelity consultants require, a non-negotiable standard when credibility and colossal deals hang in the balance. Early traction, though shrouded in the industry's characteristic secrecy, suggests the thesis has merit; the startup claims three of the world's top five consulting firms as clients, reporting time savings of 60-80% on active projects, though none can be named publicly.

#Ascentra Labs

#AI automation

#consulting industry

#survey analysis

#private equity

#seed funding

#enterprise software

#Excel automation

#featured