While working as the chief financial officer of a venture-backed beauty brand, Drew Fallon started building a custom data warehouse for the business so all of the startup’s information could be centralized. After a year of testing, the system launched, but it was unreliable at best.

“I was one of those idiots that tried to do a big data engineering project and I ended up using a bunch of different tools that already existed and none of them were very good because they didn't ingest all the data,” Fallon tells Forbes. “I was trying to stitch together this forecasting tool with this data pipelining tool, with this business intelligence tool, and it's a terrible nightmare.”

Consumer brands are not meant to waste time and energy on data engineering, Fallon realized, even though it could be a gamechanger for businesses with ever-changing data streams: “In a world where there's so many moving pieces,” Fallon says, “you're trying to spend money on ads, you're trying to buy the right amount of inventory, you're trying to test new products and you're trying to hire people–cash visibility becomes very, very difficult because you have so many different things you have to track.”

Amid those challenges, Fallon realized he could solve the massive problem impacting all of his competitors, as well as the rest of the consumer goods industry. As the CEO of the Chicago-based Iris Finance, the 28-year-old entrepreneur is leading an AI-fueled financial planning revolution for food and packaged goods companies. Iris Finance connects every source of data—from Walmart, Target and Shopify sales and Facebook ads to investor cap........

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