Pennywise: Drew Fallon started Iris Finance to connect every source of data—from sales and Facebook ads to investor cap tables and corporate credit cards—to save consumer brands as much money as possible.
Iris Finance
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 tables and corporate credit cards—and then streamlines financial tasks such as modeling and inventory planning with the goal of saving the business as much money as possible.
Since launching Iris in 2024, Fallon has raised a total of $8.5 million, including from Glasswing Ventures, Founder Collective and Hyde Park Angels. His $6.2 million series A, which closed earlier this year, valued the startup at $24 million, or an implied value of about 10 times trailing revenue. From more than 100 brands that pay for a subscription each month, Iris is on track to bring in $3 million in revenue by the end of this year, its first full year in business. That momentum landed Fallon on the 2026 30 Under 30 food and drink list.
“Data is the oil of AI,” says Fallon. “We’ve adopted this pretty novel approach to building data pipelines where we can actually process an inordinate amount of information.”
Fallon and his two cofounders, chief operating officer Alex Heckmann, 34, and chief technology officer Marko Iwanik, 35, control the business with over 50% ownership combined.
“Iris is the CEO dashboard I wish I had 5 years ago,” says 30 Under 30 alum Jim DeCiccio, who cofounded Super Coffee in 2015 and now invests at Anthos Capital. “Drew’s running a well-oiled machine.”
Fallon grew up in Chicago, the son of an investment consultant and a nurse. He graduated from Miami University with a degree in finance in 2019.
Prior to launching Iris, he experienced firsthand the difficulties of cashflow management while serving as CFO of beauty startup Mad Rabbit, which was founded by 30 Under 30 honorees and raised $20 million from venture backers and other investors. Fallon realized over his four-year tenure that that costly mistakes are often made when trying to deploy capital on advertising and inventory when the data available is months old or incomplete at best.
And when he realized that an estimated 80% of small business failures are attributed to cash flow mismanagement, he knew that he could start a business to solve the problem. But when Fallon went to investors in 2023 with his idea, no one thought AI was worth the hype. Over five months, he could barely raise $2 million for Iris’s pre-seed round.
The tides completely changed within two years, when Fallon started raising his seed round and had to fend off firms that wanted to invest for big equity stakes in Iris. Fallon closed the $6 million raise within three weeks.
“A lot of companies in our position would have raised $30 million because there’s all these investors that are really trying to pressure founders to take more,” Fallon says, “not because it is in the best interest of the company, but because it’s in the best interest of the investor.”
While a lot of money has dried up for food businesses, AI startups like Iris are currently the darlings of the food tech world. Iris’ launch was well-timed to this underlying shift, as profit margins became more of a priority for venture-backed brand founders. Says Fallon, “the conversation in the industry really started to shift away from, how can I grow another dollar of revenue, to, how can I grow another dollar of profit? People are much more focused on profit than they used to be.”
For many companies, the data is often so compartmentalized, says Chris Fenster, a customer through his firm Propeller Industries, a New York-based finance and accounting firm that works with more than 1,500 consumer brands.
“The fact that Drew was an actual CFO at a brand, he is the customer here. It’s not a couple of tech guys with a good idea just trying to force feed something into a market that doesn’t need it,” says Fenster. “He has this really profound understanding of the customer, and he’s just super clever and he’s thinking a couple steps ahead.”
And when the Trump Administration’s tariffs affected food and other consumer goods companies earlier this year, Fallon feared that the stress would put additional pressure on his business. But it turned out to actually be “a pretty big tailwind”—in the first six months of 2025, Iris pulled in more sales than the entire year prior.
Says Fallon, “People wanted better visibility because every penny counts.”
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