By Vidya Peters

DataSnipper has raised hundreds of millions of dollars, and our product is AI-powered. But that is not the story of how we got here. Those things came later.

Our journey did not start with chasing the hottest technology trend, pitching investors on the next big hype cycle, or promising to change the world. It started with one painful, unsexy problem: auditors drowning in repetitive, manual work. By focusing on solving that single workflow for a very specific customer, we built the foundation for everything that followed.

That focus, combined with a scrappy, customer-obsessed culture, turned what many saw as a niche into a platform loved by the world’s biggest audit and finance firms. We built a fast-growing and profitable business without raising primary capital. Here are the drivers behind our rise.

One problem, all in

When we launched, many investors and onlookers dismissed us. “The TAM isn’t big enough,” they said. “Audit software? Not exactly a hot, hyper growth market.

But here’s the truth. When you solve a painful problem, no matter how small, better than anyone else, you don’t just capture a market, you create it.

For auditors, that problem was repetitive, error-prone documentation work. It was not glamorous. But it was painful, universal and screaming for innovation. We built a solution that tackled it head-on. By becoming indispensable in that niche, we created a wedge into a global market.

Meet users where they work

Instead of trying to drag auditors onto yet another cloud platform and teach them a new workflow, we embedded our product directly into Microsoft Excel, the universal tool of auditors and finance professionals. No retraining. No disruption. No migration. No “digital transformation” buzzwords. Just value, right where people already worked.

That decision made adoption frictionless. Suddenly, what had been a tedious, soul-crushing process became fun for the first time. Auditors weren’t just relieved, they were delighted.

That delight turned into loyalty. Junior auditors, the heaviest users, became vocal advocates, which is where it gets interesting. When those auditors moved firms, they brought DataSnipper with them. Word of mouth turned into a viral adoption loop, powering growth across the world’s largest accounting networks.

Expansion into new areas such as internal audit, tax, advisory and government audit did not come from a top-down strategy session. It came from users asking, “Can we use DataSnipper for this too?”

When customers pull you into new markets, you know you are onto something.

Hire your customers

We didn’t just listen to our customers, we hired them.

Auditors know auditors. Bringing them inside the company meant the product evolved with unmatched authenticity. These hires became internal champions for building better products, became external advisers to peers, and accelerators for adoption.

It wasn’t about theory. It was about lived experience. That credibility built trust and helped us move faster and smarter.

Build a truly global team

At DataSnipper’s office, you will hear calls and conversations in multiple languages. Our employees come from every corner of the world, reflecting the diversity of our customer base.

Today, we serve customers in more than 170 countries.

That matters. Audit and finance are global industries, but workflows, regulations and even communication styles differ by country.

In the Middle East, Arabic reads right to left, which affects how technology extracts data from documents. In Europe, financial statements use a comma as the decimal separator, while in the U.S. a dot is standard. In Japan, managers often lead with trust and do not double-check their junior team members’ work out of respect, while in other countries, regulation demands review and oversight.

Having a team that understands these nuances and can serve customers in their own language and culture means building products that work everywhere, not just in one market. Global perspective is built into the DNA of our company.

Grow fast, be scrappy

Perhaps the most unusual part of our story is this: we haven’t raised any primary capital.

While high-growth startups often depend on fundraising, we were able to balance rapid scaling with a scrappy, disciplined approach to investment. That discipline has allowed us to grow fast and profitably.

Not every unicorn requires hundreds of millions in external funding. We got there by a focus on real problems, keeping customers at the center, and resisting the temptation to chase distractions.

Our story is not about hype

We did not set out to be the loudest company in the room. We set out to make a very painful job easier, to delight customers by meeting them where they already work, and to grow with them as they pulled us into new markets. Along the way, we built a team that reflects the global, diverse and detail-oriented nature of the industry we serve.

The hype cycles will come and go. What endures is building something so useful that people cannot imagine working without it.

Vidya Peters is the CEO of DataSnipper, a leader in intelligent automation for audit and finance. Under her leadership, the company secured $100 million in funding, achieved unicorn status, acquired AI-native platform UpLink and expanded into key global markets. Previously, she was COO at Marqeta, where she helped lead the company’s IPO and CMO of MuleSoft, where she helped take the company public through to its subsequent acquisition by Salesforce 1. She began her career at Bain & Co. and has also served in leadership roles at Intuit. She holds a BS in industrial engineering from Northwestern University, an MPA in public administration from Harvard University, and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management.

Illustration: Dom Guzman

The Crunchbase Unicorn Board reached a new milestone in August, cresting above $6 trillion in total value for the first time.

Still, only four companies joined the unicorn board last month — the lowest count so far this year, mirroring the slower pace of venture funding in August.

August’s newly minted unicorns

Here are last month’s four new unicorns, by sector.

AI

• Decart takes live video and transforms its own GenAI models. Last month, the company raised a $100 million Series B at a $3.1 billion valuation. The 2-year-old San Francisco-based company raised from existing investors Sequoia Capital, Benchmark and Zeev Ventures along with new investor Aleph.

Robotics

Web Design

Biotechnology

Value jumped in 2025

Year to date through August, the value of the board has increased by close to $600 billion — including valuation additions from existing and new unicorns on the board — a significant increase from 2024 and 2023.

Of that, $154 billion was added by 91 newcomer companies who joined in the first eight months of the year.

The most highly valued new unicorns this year so far are AI lab Thinking Machines Lab at $12 billion, healthcare clinical notetaker Abridge at $5.3 billion, and 27-year-old AI data storage company DataDirect Networks at $5 billion.

But by far the largest new value added to the board this year so far was by companies that initially joined in prior years. The largest valuation increases through August went to OpenAI, SpaceX, Anthropic, Safe Superintelligence and Anduril.

And while August saw a slowdown in unicorn creation, two large raises by unicorns Anthropic and Databricks in the first few weeks of September have already pushed the Unicorn Board’s total valuation further this month, to $6.2 trillion as of this writing.

Related Crunchbase unicorn lists:

Related reading:

Methodology

The Crunchbase Unicorn Board is a curated list that includes private unicorn companies with post-money valuations of $1 billion or more and is based on Crunchbase data. New companies are added to the Unicorn Board as they reach the $1 billion valuation mark as part of a funding round.

The unicorn board does not reflect internal company valuations — such as those set via a 409a process for employee stock options — as these differ from, and are more likely to be lower than, a priced funding round. We also do not adjust valuations based on investor writedowns, which change quarterly, as different investors will not value the same company consistently within the same quarter.

Funding to unicorn companies includes all private financings to companies that are tagged as unicorns, as well as those that have since graduated to The Exited Unicorn Board.

Exits analyzed here only include the first time a company exits.

Please note that all funding values are given in U.S. dollars unless otherwise noted. Crunchbase converts foreign currencies to U.S. dollars at the prevailing spot rate from the date funding rounds, acquisitions, IPOs and other financial events are reported. Even if those events were added to Crunchbase long after the event was announced, foreign currency transactions are converted at the historic spot price.