Powering the Future of Autonomous Finance
In this exclusive interview with Biz Tech Outlook, Veena Gundavelli, Founder and CEO of Emagia, shares the inspiration behind the company’s cutting-edge AI-powered finance platform. With a mission to transform the Order-to-Cash process through intelligent automation, Emagia is leading the charge toward autonomous finance. Veena discusses the platform’s key innovations, the challenges faced by finance leaders today, and how Emagia is helping global enterprises streamline operations, accelerate cash flow, and make smarter decisions in real time.
What inspired the development of Emagia’s AI-powered finance platform?
The inspiration behind Emagia’s AI-powered finance platform stems from a clear mission: to empower back-office financial leaders—such as CFOs, VPs of treasury, controllers, and credit directors—to become more efficient and make smarter, faster decisions. For over 15 years, Emagia has championed an AI-First approach in transforming the Order-to-Cash cycle. Recognizing the inefficiencies and complexities in traditional financial operations, Emagia set out to revolutionize them with intelligent, self-driving, and touchless solutions. The platform is built to deliver cutting-edge, easy-to-deploy AI innovations that generate faster ROI and create exponential impact for accounts receivable teams and the organizations they serve.
Could you elaborate on the key features and benefits of Emagia’s digital order-to-cash platform?
Emagia’s digital Order-to-Cash platform is a comprehensive, AI-powered solution designed to optimize and automate the entire accounts receivable (AR) process. At its core is Gia, a Generative AI-based digital assistant that acts as a copilot for finance operations, streamlining tasks, enhancing compliance, and accelerating decision-making.
Key Features:
- Gia – Generative AI Digital Assistant
Gia is Emagia’s proprietary AI copilot that supports AR professionals by:- Communicating via natural language in both voice and chat across any device.
- Extracting and analyzing data from financial documents (e.g., remittances, invoices, lockbox images).
- Generating fast, actionable insights from complex finance data.
- Continuously learning and adapting to new tasks, offering exponential productivity.
- AI-Powered Credit Risk Management
Automates the credit approval process and provides real-time risk assessments to make smarter, faster credit decisions. - AI-Powered Collections Management
Enhances efficiency in collections by automating outreach, prioritizing accounts, and managing dunning processes with intelligent strategies. - AI-Powered Deductions Management
Streamlines dispute handling using reason codes and automated workflows to resolve issues quickly and accurately. - AI-Powered Cash Application
Uses advanced matching algorithms to automatically apply payments to invoices, significantly accelerating the cash posting process. - AI-Powered eInvoicing
Offers omnichannel electronic invoicing, including an Electronic Invoice Presentment and Payment (EIPP) portal for 24/7 access to invoices, payment processing, and dispute resolution. - AI-Powered Payments
Modernizes global B2B payments with intelligent orchestration that ensures fast, secure, and cost-effective transactions. - Order-to-Cash Analytics
Delivers real-time, intelligent insights into credit, collections, and cash flow performance, helping teams make data-driven decisions.
Benefits:
- Increased Efficiency: Automates repetitive tasks and reduces manual work.
- Faster Decision-Making: Real-time insights and predictive analytics support smarter financial decisions.
- Improved Compliance: Ensures consistent, policy-driven processes across the AR function.
- Enhanced Customer Experience: Streamlined invoicing, dispute resolution, and payment processes reduce friction for customers.
- Higher Productivity: Gia boosts productivity by handling multiple administrative tasks simultaneously—far exceeding human capacity.
Together, these features make Emagia’s platform a next-gen solution for organizations aiming to drive digital transformation in finance and build intelligent, autonomous order-to-cash operations.
How does your AI-driven Digital Finance Assistant improve decision-making for finance teams?
Emagia’s AI-driven Digital Finance Assistant, Gia, significantly enhances decision-making across all levels of finance teams by delivering fast, intelligent, and actionable insights while automating routine tasks. Designed to act as a digital copilot, Gia brings both cognitive intelligence and operational efficiency to finance organizations.
For CFOs & Finance Executives:
Gia empowers leadership with:
- Real-time insights and predictive analytics for faster, more confident decision-making.
- Instant access to financial data across enterprise systems like Emagia, SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft, Teradata, and Solix.
- Conversational interface for querying financial KPIs, trends, and summaries, enabling quick strategic decisions without the need for manual data mining.
For Finance Operations & Shared Services Staff:
Gia enhances daily operations by:
- Automating repetitive tasks, such as sending invoices, validating business licenses, or checking balances.
- Providing function-specific assistance, helping credit, billing, collections, and treasury teams perform their tasks faster and with fewer errors.
- Reducing process bottlenecks by delivering instant responses and support, minimizing delays in operational workflows.
For Vendors, Suppliers, Customers & Sales Teams:
Gia improves stakeholder interactions by:
- Offering conversational self-service support to handle common finance-related queries like order status, payments, credit applications, and receipts.
- Streamlining document and form processing, ensuring faster onboarding and transaction completion.
- Bridging communication gaps between internal teams and external partners with always-on support.
Key Benefits:
- Smarter decisions, faster – with predictive insights and contextual data access.
- Higher productivity – by automating manual tasks and minimizing turnaround times.
- Greater agility – Gia continuously learns and evolves, gaining new skills to support finance functions such as procure-to-pay, record-to-report, treasury, tax, and audit.
With Gia, finance teams can focus more on strategy and less on repetitive work—leading to sharper decisions, stronger performance, and more agile finance operations.
What industries have benefited most from Emagia’s solutions, and how have their financial processes been transformed?
Emagia’s AI-powered finance solutions have delivered transformative results across a wide range of industries, with particularly strong success in manufacturing, logistics, consumer packaged goods (CPG), and healthcare/medical devices. Companies in these sectors often deal with complex supply chains, global operations, and high transaction volumes—making them ideal candidates for digital transformation in the Order-to-Cash (O2C) process.
Key Industries and Impact:
- Manufacturing & Medical Devices
One standout example is a global medical supplies manufacturer with multi-billion-dollar revenues and operations spanning North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and South America. Facing challenges with growing operational costs, limited visibility into AR performance, and cash flow issues, the company turned to Emagia for a full-scale digital transformation.
Results Achieved:
- 30% improvement in DSO (Days Sales Outstanding)
- Over 40% reduction in operational costs
- 95%+ straight-through cash application processing (zero human touch)
- Over 80% of AR moved to current status
- Multilingual support for global operations (15+ languages for inbound/outbound communication)
- Enhanced customer visibility, metrics tracking, and SLA performance
- Logistics & Supply Chain
Companies like Seko and Samsara have adopted Emagia’s platform to manage high volumes of transactions and streamline billing, collections, and cash application processes. Automation has helped these organizations optimize working capital and improve service levels across global logistics networks.
- Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG)
Clients like The Honest Tea Co., Brother, and Staples have leveraged Emagia’s AI-powered tools to drive efficiency across their AR operations. With frequent orders, complex deduction scenarios, and varied payment terms, Emagia’s automation tools have helped reduce errors, accelerate collections, and boost customer satisfaction.
- Non-Profit and Professional Services
Organizations such as the American Heart Association and Meredith Corporation have also benefited by digitizing their finance operations to gain real-time insights, ensure compliance, and optimize cash flow management.
Common Transformational Outcomes:
- Streamlined global deployments with phased rollouts across continents
- Multilingual document processing and communication
- AI-powered automation across invoicing, collections, deductions, cash application, and forecasting
- Faster cash conversion cycles and improved liquidity
- Data-driven decision-making with real-time, predictive analytics
Through its flexible and scalable platform, Emagia continues to help finance teams across industries transition to intelligent, touchless, and autonomous operations—delivering measurable business value and enabling world-class financial performance.
What major challenges do finance leaders face today, and how does Emagia help address those issues?
Finance leaders today face a rapidly evolving landscape marked by increasing complexity, dispersed data, growing customer expectations, and pressure to improve cash flow and operational efficiency. Emagia addresses these core challenges with its AI-powered, autonomous Order-to-Cash platform, purpose-built to transform the way finance teams operate.
Key Challenges and How Emagia Solves Them:
- Fragmented Financial Data Across Multiple Systems
The Challenge:
Accounts receivable (AR) data is often scattered across various enterprise systems—ERPs, logistics platforms, POD systems, trade promotions tools, and customer communications (e.g., emails, PDFs, check images). Payments and remittances arrive through multiple channels and in multiple languages, making it difficult for AR teams to consolidate and act on this information.
Emagia’s Solution:
- Gia, the Digital Finance Assistant, aggregates data from diverse sources through seamless integrations with platforms like SAP, Oracle, and more.
- Advanced document intelligence enables Gia to read, understand, and process emails, remittance documents, PDFs, and multilingual inputs (e.g., German, Spanish, French).
- Gia contextualizes and takes next-step actions automatically—such as applying payments to the right invoice or escalating a short payment for review—reducing manual effort and increasing accuracy.
Impact:
- Significantly reduced operational workload
- Improved data visibility and response time
- Higher accuracy in cash application and dispute resolution
- Delayed Cash Flow and Payment Friction
The Challenge:
Lengthy, manual processes and limited payment options delay collections and impact cash flow. In today’s digital B2B environment, companies are demanding seamless, self-service payment experiences.
Emagia’s Solution:
- AI-Driven Payment Integration is embedded across every touchpoint—email reminders, customer letters, and self-service portals.
- Customers can pay directly from a link in their invoice notification or access a branded customer payments portal launched in just days.
- Gia assists customers on the portal, answering questions, guiding payment processes, and resolving basic inquiries in real time.
Impact:
- Accelerated cash inflows
- Reduced Days Sales Outstanding (DSO)
- Enhanced customer experience with self-service, 24/7 access
- Manual, Labor-Intensive AR Processes
The Challenge:
Finance teams spend excessive time on repetitive tasks like validating documents, applying payments, sending reminders, and chasing deductions. This reduces focus on strategic initiatives.
Emagia’s Solution:
- Gia automates the end-to-end Order-to-Cash cycle, including credit checks, collections, deductions, disputes, invoicing, and cash application.
- The platform brings touchless, intelligent automation, reducing the need for full-time equivalents (FTEs) and enabling finance staff to focus on value-driven tasks.
Impact:
- Over 40% reduction in AR operational costs (as seen with clients like a global medical device company)
- 95%+ straight-through processing in cash application
- Improved operational agility and scalability
- Lack of Timely and Actionable Insights
The Challenge:
Finance leaders often lack real-time visibility into AR performance, making it difficult to make informed decisions on credit risk, collections strategy, and cash flow forecasting.
Emagia’s Solution:
- Order-to-Cash Analytics delivers real-time dashboards and predictive insights.
- Gia provides quick, natural language-based answers and forecasts, helping leaders monitor KPIs and make fast, data-backed decisions.
Impact:
- Smarter, faster decision-making for CFOs and finance leaders
- Proactive cash flow management
- Better compliance with SLAs and financial goals
Summary:
Emagia empowers finance leaders to overcome today’s biggest AR and finance operations challenges by delivering:
- Data unification and intelligent automation
- Frictionless payments and customer experience
- AI-powered insights for better decision-making
- Scalable digital infrastructure for global operations
With Emagia, finance teams are equipped to transition from manual, reactive operations to intelligent, autonomous finance—driving efficiency, agility, and strategic growth.
Please share us about the founder and the leadership team to our audience.
Veena Gundavelli, CEO and Founder, Emagia
Veena Gundavelli is a Silicon Valley-based tech innovator and entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience in the software industry. She is the founder and CEO of Emagia, a leading provider of cloud-based autonomous finance for Order-to-Cash that leverage advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and predictive analytics.
She has been recognized for her contributions to the tech industry with numerous awards and honors, including recently being named one of the “Top 25 CEOs in AI 2024” by The Software Report and has been a past finalist for “Entrepreneur of the Year ” by WIT Silicon Valley and “Innovator of the Year” by the Women in IT Awards. She was twice awarded “Trailblazer of the Year” by Forum of Women Entrepreneurs (FWE) and recognized as a “Woman of Distinction in Technology” by the Silicon Valley Business Journal.
In addition to her work at Emagia, Veena is also a “social entrepreneur” and has been actively involved in various philanthropic initiatives. She is the founder of the #TALScouts Youth Social Entrepreneurship program and #TouchALifeGiving, which aims to support homeless students. Veena is also a regular contributor to the Forbes Technology Council and is a sought-after speaker at tech forums and events.
In academia, Veena was also an adjunct faculty member at the University of California, Davis Graduate School of Business and a visiting speaker at the San Jose State University Graduate School of Business. Veena earned her MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
“AI-Driven. Data-Smart. Finance Transformed.”
“Accelerate Cash Flow. Automate Everything. Achieve More.”
Company Name : Emagia
Website : https://www.emagia.com/
Management Team
Veena Gundavelli | CEO and Founder
