Nominal, the AI company that has saved finance teams more than 50,000 hours of manual accounting work, has announced a comprehensive rebrand alongside the formal declaration of a new software category: Agentic Performance Management (APM). The move signals a deliberate shift away from the incremental automation narrative that has defined enterprise finance technology for decades, positioning Nominal as the company building the infrastructure for the next era of finance operations.
Quick Intel
From a Lived Problem to a New Category
Nominal was founded in April 2023 by Guy Leibovitz and Golan Kopichinsky, not in response to a market trend, but out of direct experience with a problem they had encountered twice. First at their own startup, and then again at a Fortune 500 company following the acquisition of their previous company, Cognigo, by NetApp. In both cases, the challenge was the same: finance teams buried in manual work, dependent on ERP systems designed for a previous era, with month-end close cycles dragging on for weeks and senior accountants spending time on spreadsheet reconciliation rather than strategic decision-making.
Leibovitz drew a sharp contrast between what has passed for progress in the ERP market and what Nominal is building toward: "The last major shift in the ERP market was the move to the cloud over two decades ago. Everything since has been incremental — better dashboards, better alerts. But the work itself is still manual. What's happening now is different. Just like Cursor changed how developers write code, we're seeing the same shift in accounting — from systems that assist, to systems that actually execute the work. That's why we built Nominal."
The Limits of Traditional Automation in Finance
The finance technology industry has marketed automation as a solution to operational inefficiency for years. The reality experienced by finance teams, however, has consistently fallen short of that promise. Automation surfaced information, sent reminders, and organized data, but it never completed the work. Every workflow still required a human to push it across the finish line, rendering the efficiency gains largely superficial.
The cumulative effect of this gap is significant. A $220 billion ERP market continues to operate on outdated logic, the US workforce is short approximately 300,000 CPAs, and the complexity of managing multi-entity, multi-currency, and multi-regulation finance continues to grow year over year. The tools sold as solutions have not kept pace with the scale and complexity of modern finance operations, leaving teams to absorb the difference through manual effort.
What Agentic Performance Management Actually Means
Nominal's rebrand introduces APM as a category built around autonomy rather than assistance. Where traditional automation tools surface data and prompt action, APM executes. Nominal's intelligent agents handle workflows from initiation to completion, covering transaction reconciliation, book closing, variance analysis, journal entry generation, and insight delivery, all without requiring human input at each stage.
Leibovitz was direct about why an entirely new category was necessary: "This isn't the next tool. It's the next era. We created Agentic Performance Management because no existing category described what we actually do. We don't assist finance teams. We act for them."
This distinction between assistance and execution is the core of Nominal's market position. The company is not competing within the existing automation category; it is arguing that the category itself is insufficient for what enterprise finance operations now require.
The Company's Growth Trajectory
Nominal launched in 2023 with a shadow ledger approach, extending existing ERP systems and layering intelligence on top of them. By 2024, the company had raised $9.2 million in seed funding, deployed across hundreds of entities, and was managing over $1 billion in book value. Early customer results were immediate, with one mid-sized energy company reporting savings of more than 20 hours per week from the outset.
In July 2025, Nominal closed a $20 million Series A led by Next47, with participation from Workday Ventures and continued support from Bling Capital and Hyperwise Ventures, bringing total funding to $30 million. The funding trajectory reflects growing institutional confidence in both the APM category and Nominal's position within it.
Real-World Impact on Finance Operations
The most illustrative evidence of APM's practical value comes from Nominal's customer deployments. Team Car Care, the largest Jiffy Lube franchisee in the US with nearly 500 locations, had a finance team of four people managing inventory reconciliations across a high daily transaction volume. After deploying Nominal, that work was handled by one person, not through headcount reduction, but because the volume of work previously requiring four people was now being autonomously executed by the platform.
Matt Castaway, CFO of Team Car Care, described the operational shift: "Adding Nominal on top of it has allowed us to take that person and shift them over to different work." The change also transformed how the team relates to month-end close. Rather than a high-pressure, weeks-long sprint, the process became continuous: "You're just always closing, right? And so it doesn't get backed up."
Josh Ramos, Controller at GSPP, a multi-entity solar company, described the before-and-after of financial consolidation: "Consolidating financials across our solar projects used to be a nightmare. After Nominal, intercompany eliminations and consolidation happen automatically, saving us countless hours and keeping our books audit-ready."
These outcomes represent more than incremental efficiency gains. They reflect a structural change in how finance teams define their work, what tasks belong to humans, and what is delegated entirely to agents.
Why the Timing of This Shift Matters
Nominal's rebrand arrives as AI agents transition from experimental technology to foundational enterprise infrastructure. Finance, historically one of the slowest functions to modernize, is now at the center of this transition. The companies that establish agentic systems early stand to accumulate a structural advantage over time, through faster closes, reduced error rates, higher-quality insights, and teams refocused on work that drives business outcomes rather than work that maintains operational baseline.
Leibovitz framed the long-term stakes plainly: "Headcount can't scale infinitely. But intelligence can. The finance teams that understand this first will define the next decade of their industries."
For Nominal, the rebrand is not a repositioning exercise. It is the company making explicit what it has been building toward since its founding: a world where finance operations run themselves, governed by agents, accountable to humans, and no longer bottlenecked by the limits of manual execution.
About Nominal
Nominal is the creator of Agentic Performance Management (APM), the new standard for finance. Founded in 2023 by Guy Leibovitz and Golan Kopichinsky, former founders of Cognigo, Nominal's intelligent agents execute accounting workflows from start to finish.
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