The Co-Founders Vision Behind Everest: ERP Built for SaaS Businesses

Cameron Ackbury, CPA:Thank you, Franz Faerber and Sandeep Chopra, for joining me today. I’m Cameron Ackbury, and I’ll be moderating this discussion. Our goal is to help readers understand what native AI means and how it changes the game for SaaS-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

Let’s begin with introductions.  Franz, tell us about your background.

Franz Faerber:I’m one of the co-founders of Everest. We started the company five years ago. Before that, I spent over 25 years at SAP in various roles. My main focus there was building and integrating the HANA database and overseeing data management. After 26 years, I decided it was time to start fresh—building something new from the ground up, with everything I’d learned.

Cameron Ackbury, CPA:Thanks, Franz.  Sandeep, how about you?

Sandeep Chopra: Before Everest, I had a varied career. I started in management consulting at Deloitte right after Sarbanes-Oxley, working in the Security and Privacy group. I worked across financial services, manufacturing, and healthcare—always focused on business processes. Later, I moved into application infrastructure and product management. I joined Veeva Systems, which was pioneering the “industry cloud” approach combining business processes, software, and data to deliver targeted solutions.

Why Everest?

Cameron Ackbury, CPA:You two came together through Sutter Hill Ventures. What sparked the idea for Everest? Sandeep, want to start?

Sandeep Chopra: The initial spark was about people.  I met Franz and teamed up with Sutter Hill to build the next generation of ERP. Franz and I both had strong ideas about what needed to change in the space, and we spent time talking with customers across industries to understand the biggest pain points. Only then did we start writing production code and defining our market focus.

Franz Faerber: After spending most of my professional life at SAP, the world’s largest ERP company, I had a clear vision of what could be improved. ERP systems are powerful, but they’ve become bloated and overly complex. I wanted to make ERP fundamentally simpler, leveraging today’s technologies instead of being limited by decades-old designs.

Native AI vs. Legacy Systems

Cameron Ackbury, CPA: You chose to build Everest as a native AI ERP instead of bolting AI onto an old system. Franz, how does that fundamentally change the game?

Franz Faerber:Legacy ERP systems have accumulated layers of complexity over decades. You can add new features, but you're still building on an old foundation that was never designed for AI or today’s demands. For example, things like versioning or real intelligence aren’t baked into the DNA they’re bolted on.

With a clean slate, we can design around today’s capabilities. Native AI allows us to rethink how processes work, how flexible the system can be, and how intelligence is embedded throughout. It’s a new architecture, something legacy systems simply can’t retrofit.

Cameron Ackbury, CPA: Sandeep, from your side coming from consulting and cloud how does native AI change things for businesses?

Sandeep Chopra: Native AI shifts ERP from a system of record to a system of action. It gives business users capabilities that used to require developers like building agents, customizing logic, and testing changes in real time. ERP implementations traditionally involve tons of customization, which burns time and money. With native AI, we empower business users directly speeding up adaptation, reducing cost, and making the system truly responsive.

Cameron Ackbury, CPA: ERP touches every industry, so why start with automated subscription billing and revenue recognition for SaaS?

Sandeep Chopra: We decided early on to go deep into industry-specific problems. In SaaS, everything moves fast like product and pricing strategies change constantly, especially now with AI in the mix. That flexibility drives growth, but it breaks traditional ERP systems.

SaaS companies rely on land-and-expand motions: upsells, early renewals, usage-based pricing. These edge cases are difficult to model, reconcile, and scale in legacy systems. By solving those first, we’re giving SaaS companies a platform that grows with them—without drowning them in workarounds.

Franz: Most systems today offer tons of features but the challenge is end-to-end integration. Companies end up stitching together point solutions which are expensive and hard to manage.

You can implement something once, but adapting it to ongoing changes is where everything breaks. From the start, we built Everest to deliver integrated business processes for SaaS ready out of the box. No duct-taped systems. No growing pains from bad architecture.

AI Cost Control

Cameron Ackbury, CPA: One of the solutions you’re adding is cloud and AI cost control. How does that help SaaS companies operate more efficiently?

Franz: We looked at our own costs, and besides people, cloud and AI are the biggest drivers. The problem is, most companies don’t know what those costs really mean until the bill arrives.

We built controls to bring cloud and AI spend under financial oversight not just in DevOps, but inside the ERP. We use it ourselves, and it’s made a huge difference. We want our customers to have the same visibility and control.

Cameron Ackbury, CPA: Sandeep, anything to add?

Sandeep Chopra:To be a complete ERP, you have to support both the top line and the bottom line. SaaS companies spent years focused only on growth. Now it’s about balanced growth with strong gross margins.

You can’t do that without understanding unit economics. Which customers and product lines are profitable? Which aren’t? You need visibility into cloud costs and labor costs to get there.

Cameron Ackbury, CPA: Beyond finance automation, how else does Everest support subscription businesses? Do you offer dashboards, integrated reporting, and the like?

Sandeep Chopra: Yes. SaaS companies need to see both operational metrics like ARR, CAC, LTV and traditional accounting metrics, especially as they prepare for IPO. Most systems treat those as separate problems. We don’t.

We built Everest to integrate both from day one. That includes total cost visibility from cloud, people, departments to across geographies. Many companies go global fast, especially with PEOs. You need a unified financial lens to stay in control.

Cameron Ackbury, CPA: Franz, with your decades at SAP, what would you add?

Franz: Sales and finance are often disconnected. Sales wants freedom in systems like Salesforce or HubSpot. Finance wants structure in ERP. That disconnect leads to conflict and bad data.

We deeply integrated those systems. Everest becomes the single source of truth with one set of data, one set of calculations, shared across platforms. Users can work in the tools they prefer, but they’re all drawing from the same core. That alignment is critical.

How AI can Reimagine a Business Process

Cameron Ackbury, CPA: We’ve talked about integrations and functionality. Franz, in your opinion, what’s one complex, manual, or judgment-heavy process Everest can completely reimagine or eliminate for a SaaS business?

Franz:One key process is subscription upgrades from the moment an opportunity is created in the CRM to deployment and recognition in finance. We’ve fully automated that end-to-end workflow. Customers don’t have to manage handoffs, rekey data, or worry about compliance, it just works.

That’s especially valuable when you're dealing with ASC 606. We’ve optimized the entire process to eliminate manual intervention.

Cameron Ackbury, CPA: Sandeep, same question: what's a judgment-heavy process Everest can help automate?

Sandeep Chopra:Building on what Franz said early-stage SaaS companies typically start with simple pricing: $X per user per month. But to scale, especially in B2B, the sales motion becomes complex from custom pricing, discounting to product bundling. That complexity is unavoidable if you want to grow.

But when humans are negotiating and pricing, it introduces subjectivity and inconsistency. The result is a mess of spreadsheets, manual approvals, and disconnected systems. Everest automates that, eliminating the need to stitch together point solutions and throw headcount at problems that software should solve.

Cameron Ackbury, CPA: Right, I’ve heard that it's called a Frankenstein tech stack. Sandeep, you’ve been running U.S. sales, what’s been the most surprising customer feedback lately?

Sandeep Chopra:We expected most of our demand to come from companies graduating off QuickBooks moving to their first ERP like NetSuite or Intacct. But what’s surprised us is how many companies are replacing existing ERP systems.

That’s rare for a new entrant in this space as ERP is mission-critical. But it speaks to how broken the current experience is. The pain is big enough that teams are saying, “We’re done with workarounds. Let’s fix this the right way.”

Cameron Ackbury, CPA:Franz, any customer feedback that stood out to you?

Franz:Yes, what shocked me is how much pain companies are willing to tolerate. Manual workflows, duplicate data entry, broken processes are things we should never accept in ERP. But in ERP, people have learned to live with it.

That shouldn’t be the norm. Our message is simple: You don’t have to settle. You deserve a system that works the way you do intuitively, integrated, and pain-free. And Everest was built to deliver exactly that.

Cameron Ackbury, CPA: Some companies are in so much pain they’re even considering building their own ERP. So let’s talk about the roadmap. Beyond revenue automation and recognition Franz, where is Everest going next?

Franz:There are a few directions we’re heading. Of course, AI is a big one. Everyone’s using it for process automation, but we’re looking deeper at what AI means for the future of business applications.

If it becomes easier to generate applications, then functionality alone stops being the differentiator. The real value shifts to being a platform that guarantees correctness, compliance, and deep integration. Everest is positioning itself as that foundational layer where even custom or AI-generated applications can run securely and reliably.

Cameron Ackbury, CPA: Got it. Sandeep, how do you see the roadmap evolving?

Sandeep Chopra:Franz covered the platform side. On the application side, we started with core accounting and linked it to order-to-cash, cloud costs, and workforce costs. Next, we’re moving into adjacent areas like procurement and FP&A.

We're also doing early work in industries beyond SaaS, still subscription-based, but with different operational needs. Our focus is on expanding vertically and horizontally to become a broader platform for modern finance operations.

Advice

Cameron Ackbury, CPA: Final question. Sandeep, what advice would you give to a forward-looking CFO or CEO trying to integrate AI across a subscription-based business?

Sandeep Chopra:Two things. First, use AI to eliminate repetitive tasks like flux analysis at month-end or quarter-end. That’s a baseline use case.  Second, and more important: empower your business users. Use AI to help them build what they need faster and more independently. When non-technical teams can self-serve and move quickly, that’s when the business really starts to scale with AI.

Cameron Ackbury, CPA: Franz, what is your advice?

Franz:If you want to be an AI company, it’s not just about tech. Your people need to become AI people. That means guiding and sometimes pushing them to adopt new ways of working.

It’s a shift in mindset, roles, and tools and it has to be managed like any major transformation. That’s why we’ve even developed an HR solution to help companies make this cultural and organizational shift to becoming AI-native.

Cameron Ackbury, CPA: Thank you both Franz and Sandeep for helping our audience understand what native AI really means for SaaS ERP. Appreciate your time, and have a great afternoon.

Franz:Thank you.

Sandeep Chopra:Thank you.

The future of ERP is here, and it’s Native AI ERP.   Let’s build it together.

Cameron Ackbury, CPA

Advisor to the Office of the CFO

cameron@everest-erp.com

+1 650-223-4557