Built by finance people, for finance people
Closegrove was founded in 2023 in New York's Financial District by Jonathan Klein and Maria Chen — one from finance operations, one from the controller seat — after years of watching close teams fight the same battles with the same broken tools.
NYC Financial District
The product we wished we had
Jonathan Klein spent several years in finance operations at a mid-size financial services firm in New York, where every month-end close felt like managing a manual relay race. The ERP recorded transactions. Excel held the reconciliations. Slack carried the status updates. Nothing tied them together into a controlled, auditable close process.
Maria Chen was living the same problem from the controller seat at a regional manufacturing company — building and rebuilding close checklists in shared spreadsheets, discovering accrual variances on day seven, assembling audit binders from folders of unversioned files. Both of them knew the close management layer their ERP was never going to build.
We started Closegrove in 2023 with one goal: give mid-market controllers the close workflow infrastructure that BlackLine charges enterprise prices for — self-serve, priced honestly, deployed by the controller in a week without an implementation partner.
We are independently operated and funded by our customers, not by venture capital. Our incentive is renewal — building something you use every month-end for years — not a funding narrative or an acquisition timeline.
The people behind Closegrove
Jonathan Klein
CEO & Co-Founder
Former finance operations practitioner at a mid-size New York financial services firm. Closegrove is his second software company — the first was a data integration tool built for the same finance team that inspired this one.
Maria Chen
Co-Founder & Head of Product
Former controller at a regional manufacturing company, where she built and rebuilt the close checklist process for four years. The workflow she designed there became Closegrove's core template engine.
Daniel Osei
Head of Engineering
10 years building financial data infrastructure at early-stage and growing fintech companies. Joined Closegrove to architect the ERP sync layer — the part of the product controllers ask about first.
What we stand for
Finance-grade reliability
Month-end close has a hard deadline. The tool that manages it cannot go down on day four. We design for the availability and data-integrity requirements of a close cycle, not a marketing SaaS.
Built for accountants, not IT
Controllers configure Closegrove themselves — mapping their chart of accounts, building their close checklist, connecting their ERP — without a professional services engagement or an IT ticket. If it takes more than a week to deploy, we've failed.
Independent. Funded by customers.
We are not VC-backed and not optimizing for an exit. Our incentive is your renewal — building a product your team uses every month-end for the next decade. No pivot risk, no acqui-hire risk, no "we're sunsetting the product" email.
Talk to us
Questions about the product, integration questions, or just want to talk through your close setup — we respond within one business day. No sales team gatekeeping.