Seeing through the commas and periods.
Rigorously human.
As CFO
Growing companies move faster than their infrastructure. The cost: margins drift and contracts bite. The cap table remembers every concession.
Independent of any stake in the room, my obligation is to what actually accelerates the company. Financial and legal governance is the core of that job. Both are forward-looking: the guardrails that make it possible to go faster.
My foundation is clean data. Pipelines, automated dashboards, and consistent logic around the metrics that matter: unit economics, burn rate, and revenue quality. A sales contract structured well does not just protect the ARR, it closes faster too.
In the room
Now, every CFO will tell you data is important to inform the right decisions. But the human decision maker does not blindly follow the logic the model assumes.
Every call that moves through a company picks up the risk preference of everyone it passes through, and none of them are optimizing for the same thing. The investor pushes for the milestone. The founder pushes for the story to hold. The employee pushes to keep their job. The company ends up somewhere between all of them, but never as far as it could have gone.
Knowing who is in the room, and what they are protecting, is what makes it possible for me to set goals that are anchored to what actually moves the company forward. Align the long-term incentives and it moves as one.
That is why: humens.
On the record
A decade in B2B SaaS, from Seed to Series F.
At Simvia most recently, a VC-backed compliance-tech scaleup, my mandate covered the full capital raise: structure, terms, documentation, and close. Alongside that, a full redesign of the pricing architecture, scenario modeling and strategic planning to stress-test the growth assumptions, and the board reporting structured to make a high-burn growth strategy defensible to investors.
At Eagle Eye Networks before that, 7+ years, Accel-backed and scaling through Series E and F, I built the EMEA finance, HR, and operations function from the ground up post-M&A. The work covered the full range: accounting infrastructure to listed company-level, BI and reporting, margin improvement across hardware and subscriptions, international tax architecture, and legal counsel.
Before that, controller at Copernica, a bootstrapped SaaS business running at positive EBITDA, where my work included multi-entity tax strategy, restructuring an underperforming subsidiary, and advising the founders on exit planning.
LL.M. Business Law. MSc Financial Economics. CFA Level 1.
Your call
The engagements that work for me have one thing in common: the founder already knows the architecture needs to be built for the pace the company is moving at. Not a vague sense that finance could be better: a structure that accelerates.
For investors, I know where you sit in the room: the milestone pressure, the LP reporting cycle, the company three months behind on something they told you was resolved. If a portfolio company needs someone who can build the financial architecture and hold the line, reach out.
Ralf van Heumen