Pry: The Automated Y Combinator
Andy Su, co-founder of Pry, on building the "Figma of finance"
The core idea is to turn startup advice from a partner driven service into software that watches a company’s live finances, models its future, and tells the founder what to do next. Pry sits at that point in the stack. It connects to bookkeeping, banking, cards, and payroll, builds the forecast, and can eventually use that standardized picture to benchmark companies, guide decisions, and underwrite lending.
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Y Combinator works through repeated partner office hours, small group sessions, a shared founder knowledge base, and investor access. An automated version replaces the human partner with software that reads the company’s numbers continuously and turns that into prompts, benchmarks, scenario plans, and introductions to capital.
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Pry’s wedge is that finance data is more operational than pitch deck advice. A founder already needs a cash forecast to know hiring pace, runway, and fundraising timing. If Pry standardizes that workflow across hundreds of startups, it can learn what strong companies look like and use that to recommend or finance them.
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This is why FP&A mattered strategically beyond subscriptions. Modern APIs from QuickBooks, Xero, Gusto, and Finch made it possible to pull the raw inputs automatically, while products like Runway and Causal showed the same broader shift from spreadsheet based planning to collaborative finance software. Brex buying Pry for $90M confirmed that this planning layer could become part of a larger startup operating system.
The direction is toward finance software that does not just record what happened, but actively coaches the company. As payroll, banking, CRM, and accounting data become more connected, the winning product looks less like a static model and more like a real time operating system for founders, with planning, guidance, and capital bundled together.