San Francisco – September 15, 2026 -- cfo.ai, formerly known as Runway, has launched Ari, an AI CFO designed to give founders a continuous finance partner that builds and maintains a live financial model of their business.
Ari connects directly to core financial systems to build live models
Ari integrates with NetSuite, QuickBooks, Rippling, ADP, Mercury, Brex, Stripe, Salesforce, Snowflake, Google Sheets and Excel to construct a financial model that updates automatically as underlying data changes. Founders can use it to forecast cash, analyze hiring plans, explain variances, prepare board updates or model the financial impact of a decision before it is made.
In one example cited by the company, a founder could ask what happens to ending cash if sales and marketing hiring slips by a quarter; Ari traces the relevant assumptions through operating expenses and cash flow across future quarters, and the founder can then adjust additional variables within the same model.
Ari monitors metrics proactively rather than waiting for questions
Beyond answering queries, Ari tracks metrics including ARR, cash, EBITDA and churn in real time, flagging meaningful changes and investigating their causes. If cash falls below plan, churn spikes in a customer segment, or hiring outpaces forecast, the system traces the underlying drivers and surfaces the issue to the founder directly.
"A CFO keeps track of the business, notices when something changes, figures out why and brings it to you," said Siqi Chen, Founder and CEO of cfo.ai. "Ari works the same way, while giving founders direct access to the model so they can understand what's happening and keep digging into the numbers themselves."
Reambase engine replaces spreadsheet coordinates with business-context addressing
Ari runs on Reambase, a multidimensional calculation engine cfo.ai built specifically for AI agents rather than adapting traditional spreadsheets. Instead of assigning values to grid coordinates such as B7 or G12, Reambase attaches business addresses built from named variables and dimensions -- revenue tied to Customer, Product, Region, Month and Scenario, or salary tied to Employee, Department and Month.
According to cfo.ai, this structure lets Ari work with the underlying business logic directly rather than reconstructing relationships scattered across hundreds of spreadsheet cells, while founders retain the ability to view and manipulate results through familiar tables and financial statements.