Crunched: An Excel AI Analyst Built for the People Who Actually Live in Spreadsheets

For all the talk of AI replacing knowledge work, one tool has stubbornly refused to be displaced: Microsoft Excel. Consultants, investment bankers, and private-equity professionals still build their core analyses in workbooks of interlinked sheets, formulas, and templates that no chatbot has yet learned to navigate reliably. Crunched, a Y Combinator Fall 2025 company, is taking direct aim at that gap. Billed as “the Excel AI analyst for power users,” Crunched lives inside Excel itself – error-checking workbooks end-to-end, building models from scratch, and handling the grunt work of extracting and linking data from information memoranda into template models, all without forcing teams to switch contexts.

The core technical bet is that tabular work is genuinely hard for general-purpose AI agents. Reliable, multi-step execution across thousands of interlinked formulas, sheets, and ranges requires a tool that understands how Excel actually behaves at the cellular level, not one that treats spreadsheets as flat tables of values. The AI financial modeling software Crunched is building required founders who have lived inside that complexity – and this team has. Co-founder and CEO Philip Borge previously worked in private equity at McKinsey and was CEO of Okkult, an AI-powered optician concept; he holds an MSc in Finance and Private Equity from the London School of Economics. Co-founder and CTO Lars Gjardar Musæus is a senior full-stack and infrastructure engineer with a track record of building production systems for forward-deployed engineering teams. Founders Michael Sakowski and Markus Skagemo round out the team. Michael and Philip bring a combined 10,000-plus hours in Excel across consulting and finance; Markus is an AI engineer with significant experience building AI agents and solutions across industries.

Early traction is unusually concrete for a young company. Crunched is already live with firms across five continents – including two of the Big Four professional services firms – and customers across private equity, investment banking, consulting, and commercial real estate are reporting 2x productivity gains across Excel and PowerPoint workflows. The strategy is sharply focused: with more than a billion total Excel users globally, Crunched is targeting the top two percent — the highest-value power users for whom even small efficiency gains translate into outsized commercial impact. The product operates as an end-to-end workflow orchestrator across Excel and PowerPoint, with a built-in review layer that keeps quality assurance from becoming the bottleneck. Operating in the finance, productivity, and analytics categories, the company is solving one pain point at a time with a deliberate goal of building software that doesn’t just demo well but actually holds up in production. Excel isn’t going anywhere, but the way experts model inside it is changing fundamentally – and Crunched intends to be the reason why.