How First Resonance Unlocked Centralized, Real-Time Business Insights with Grid

About

Founded in 2019 with a core team of SpaceX and NASA veterans, First Resonance offers a comprehensive digital manufacturing platform for mission-critical industries like aerospace, defense, and maritime. This Series A startup, backed by $32M in total funding, is modernizing and accelerating how companies build hardware, replacing legacy workflows with fully digitized processes.

Challenge

First Resonance needed accurate financial visibility to support data-driven growth

As the VP of Finance and Operations at First Resonance, Mariam Mack places critical importance on informed business decisions. Granular business analytics are a key part of this approach.

To drive strategic growth, First Resonance relies on KPIs like ARR, burn rate, and runway to guide their customer acquisition strategies and OpEx investments. Mariam also uses these metrics to reconcile cash and P&L positions. Revenue must be recognized gradually over the contract term, but First Resonance customers typically prepay annual contracts — so the company’s cash balance often diverges from their P&L statement. This made monitoring cash flow and revenue recognition essential for strategic planning and confident board updates.

But for fast-growing companies, securing that business intelligence in-house is notoriously time-consuming. It takes hours to export data from accounting systems and spreadsheets, consolidate reports, and wrangle complex formulas in Excel. Any new metrics or data updates mean starting over.

Mariam knew this manual approach could delay critical insights needed to capture more sales, enhance operational efficiency, and optimize spending. Making fast, confident decisions called for actionable reporting out of the box.

So, she began searching for a data analytics solution that could meet First Resonance’s evolving needs:

• Standardized calculations: Without a centralized system, different teams calculated the same metric using their own formulas — like sales and marketing teams using different periods to calculate CAC. To drive reliable decision-making and build trust with external stakeholders, she needed automated, industry-standard formulas for every metric.
• Accessible, transparent data: First Resonance’s teams have different levels of data expertise. To avoid spending hours translating data analysis outputs into accessible formats, the ideal platform would provide stakeholders with clear data they could explore independently.
• Flexible data analysis: She wanted a platform that delivered both high-level performance overviews and accurate, transaction-level data. This flexibility would enable her to answer investor questions on demand and give teams clarity on the underlying revenue drivers that inform their strategies.

She piloted an FP&A tool, but it soon proved too complex to reliably connect their data and implement effectively without disrupting daily operations.

Fortunately, First Resonance’s investors granted early access to Grid for their portfolio companies. The platform’s automated, real-time data syncs and comprehensive data analytics aligned perfectly with the company’s analytics needs.

Solution

Unified business intelligence with self-serve analytics for every stakeholder

With Grid’s data mapping support, Mariam seamlessly connected First Resonance’s spreadsheets and QuickBooks. The result was an instant, unified overview of the company’s financial and operational performance.

With this setup, First Resonance has instant access to all the growth, efficiency, and billing metrics their teams need — and more. Grid refreshes KPIs as new data flows in, eliminating manual data transfers and enabling informed decision-making at every level.

With this single source of truth, Mariam and her teams analyze expansion and contraction movements, track expense patterns against their cash flow projections, and monitor product margins. Armed with this data, teams easily refine growth strategies every month.

Beyond these benefits, every company team also has access to:

• Industry-standard formulas: Grid calculates every metric with formulas investors know and rely on. This standardization lets teams focus on analysis without worrying about conflicting numbers, all while building investor trust.
• Intuitive, self-serve analytics: With Grid, First Resonance has clear, actionable reports that break down complex business insights. With granular access control and self-serve capabilities, every team analyzes the data independently, building tailored views and making faster decisions. These fine-tuned permissions also enable secure data sharing with board members and external stakeholders to identify emerging opportunities.
• Dynamic data exploration: Through dynamic groupings and customizable data configurations, teams explore data from any angle. Using flexible trailing period settings, they can compare past marketing expenses to current revenue to evaluate campaign effectiveness. And with a click, they can drill down on KPIs like CAC and LTV to see which channels deliver the highest-value accounts, optimizing acquisition and spending.

Where financial data once required specialized knowledge to interpret, Grid’s customizable, intuitive dashboards put key SaaS metrics — like revenue, profitability, efficiency, and runway — at the fingertips of every First Resonance stakeholder.