Why We Invested in Balance HQ

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“The spreadsheet keeps me up at night. I’m worried something is going to be wrong in one of the formulas or I broke it somehow and won’t figure it out.” - Dr. Terry Robinson, Superintendent, Tipton R-IV

Every K-12 finance director knows that dread: one stray cell and a $50 million budget unravels in front of a school board. That anxiety is what founders John Larrick and Dr. Ben Latimer set out to erase. After hearing the same story from district after district, they built Balance HQ: a platform that ingests a single export and delivers live dashboards, one-click scenarios, and peer benchmarks, so finance leaders walk into the boardroom ready to discuss strategy, not worrying about if their spreadsheet will fall apart.

The Opportunity

• Education-finance tools already represent a $5.7B market on track for $12.3B by 2033

• Incumbents like Tyler Technologies have expanded their budgeting and ERP suite into non-profits and governments, pulling in $1.95B ARR as a tool built in the 1990s 

• ESSER funds are set to expire, transparency mandates are tightening, and districts are scrambling for a tool for scenario planning

What Balance is Building: 

• One-upload onboarding: District exports a flat file on Friday; interactive dashboards appear on Monday.

• Scenario Builder: Test a 2 % raise, enrollment dip, or bond issue and watch five-year fund balance ripple in seconds, not days.

• Peer benchmarks on tap: Every metric auto-compares to demographically similar districts, turning debates into data.

• Plain-language charts, single-percentage health scores, Excel export when you need it to be board meeting ready 

In just five months, founders John Larrick and Dr. Ben Latimer transformed Balance HQ from a prototype into a platform now live in six districts, managing a $350 million annual budget. All achieved without a sales team or marketing spend.

Every deployment enriches an anonymized benchmark dataset, sharpening the product and fueling a referral flywheel among superintendents, positioning Balance to spread rapidly well beyond schools. We’re excited to partner with John and Ben as they scale Balance HQ into the budgeting operating system that lets every public school board, nonprofit, and municipality plan with clarity and confidence.