Letter from the CEO: Hercules and the New Growth Era
- Jan 16
- 5 min read
Building Financial Precision in a World That Demands Trust
As 2025 came to a close, I found myself reflecting on what it took to get us where we are now. Building something that lasts is hard, intentional work. It requires judgment under pressure, discipline when shortcuts are tempting, and people who care deeply about getting the details right.
What we have built at Hercules is a direct result of that mindset. It reflects the commitment of our team and the trust our customers, partners, and investors have placed in us. That trust is not something we take lightly.
The past year was pivotal. We completed a full company rebrand (from Zero to Hero, as the name Hercules reflects much better what we want to achieve), raised a $26 million Series B, launched our AI platform focused on Order-to-Cash, and completed the divestiture of our legal business through its acquisition by Aderant, a Roper Technologies company.
Each of these moments mattered. Together, they gave us clarity.
From day one, we believed it was possible to build a scalable platform capable of automating some of the most complex enterprise workflows in existence. Not the processes neatly documented in flowcharts, but the ones that live in people’s heads. The ones shaped by years of exceptions, tribal knowledge, and judgment calls. The ones that sit directly between a company and its revenue.
Most automation systems never touch this layer. They can’t. The complexity breaks them. It is considered impossible.
We labeled “the impossible” problem as “very difficult” and started breaking it down piece by piece.
We began in legal, one of the most operationally complex back offices in the enterprise world. There, we built an Order-to-Cash solution and scaled our market presence across more than 40 of the largest law firms globally. That traction led to the acquisition of our legal business by Aderant.
That moment was not an ending. It was proof.
Proof that our approach worked. Proof that we could take institutional judgment, encode it, and run it at scale. And proof that the real opportunity was bigger than any single vertical.
The divestiture gave us the resources and focus to do what we set out to do from the start: build a universal platform for complex Order-to-Cash processes in industries where financial precision is not optional, and margins are measured in basis points.
Today, we are entering a new era for Hercules.
Why Now? Precision Is No Longer Optional
The economic environment has changed. Pressure on margins is real. Volatility is persistent. And the tolerance for financial leakage is gone.
Finance and operations teams are being asked to do more with less, while managing higher volumes of data, more fragmented systems, and tighter compliance requirements. Human review and traditional BPO models cannot keep up with this reality. They are too slow, too expensive, and too fragile at scale.
We cannot solve the problems of the new economy with the tools of the past.
That is why Hercules is focused where the pain is sharpest: mid-to-large enterprises in Staffing, Insurance, Financial Services, and Government. In these sectors, it is common to lose 5 percent or more of annual revenue and 10 days of DSO to billing errors, slow onboarding, and reactive reconciliation.
These losses are not strategic decisions. They are operational failures.
The future of finance and operations is AI-driven, but only if that AI can be trusted. Our mission is simple to state and hard to execute: deliver perfect, verifiable financial precision at scale.
AI Is a Fundamental Shift, and Most Are Approaching It Wrong
Artificial intelligence is not a feature. It is a foundational shift in how software is built and how work gets done.
But there is an uncomfortable truth many avoid: most AI systems today are not suitable for processes that require trust, precision, and auditability.
Modern AI is inherently non-deterministic*. Given the same input, it does not always produce the same output. That flexibility makes AI powerful for reasoning, pattern recognition, and edge cases. It also makes it unreliable for financial workflows where repeatability and correctness matter.
Many companies are deploying AI directly into production decision-making and hoping accuracy improves over time. It results in AI vendors selling dreams but then deploying nightmares. That approach works for content generation. It fails in finance.
At Hercules, we took a different path.
We use non-deterministic AI for what it does best: understanding unstructured information, reasoning through ambiguity, and designing solutions to complex problems. But we do not leave execution to probability. Instead, our AI writes, tests, and validates its own task-specific code. It iterates until confidence is high, then converts that solution into deterministic execution. The result is software that behaves predictably, can be audited, and can be trusted in production.
In short, our AI learns like a human, collaborates with humans, and runs like software.
That distinction is everything.
Defining the New Growth Era: Our Three Core Priorities
Our strategy moving forward rests on three core priorities.
1. Platform Excellence: An Architecture Built for Trust
The Hercules platform is designed to be the system of trust for financial processes.
Our AI models extract business logic, transactional data, and organizational context from unstructured sources such as contracts, invoices, rate cards, and guidelines. In parallel, transactional data from fragmented systems is normalized into a common schema.
Hercules then translates business logic into executable code and validates every transaction against that formalized logic. Discrepancies are detected, explained, audited, and corrected.
The key difference is reliability.
LLMs are used to reason, design validation strategies, and generate code. Once validated, the output becomes deterministic. The same input always produces the same result. No hallucinations. Full auditability. Production-grade execution.
This is how true AI earns a seat in finance.
2. Strategic Growth: Resilience as a Competitive Advantage
We are expanding across North America, the UK, Europe, and Middle East, focusing on industries where operational precision directly determines resilience.
Our customer success model is simple: measurable financial outcomes.
This includes helping staffing firms operate profitably through market turns, enabling insurers to process and validate submissions and claims at enterprise scale while significantly cutting manual effort, and supporting government organizations in modernizing fragmented, compliance-heavy workflows.
In every case, the goals are the same: tighter control, faster execution, and confidence in the numbers.
3. Culture & Team: The Scale of Judgment, Not Replacing It
AI should not replace human judgment. It should scale it.
By automating precision, we free experts from repetitive, error-prone work and allow them to focus on decisions that actually move the business forward. This shift creates a talent renaissance, both within Hercules and across our customer base.
Our culture values courage, judgment, accountability, and clarity. Those principles guide how we build, how we sell, and how we partner.
Looking Ahead
We enter this next chapter with confidence and focus. The last year sharpened our strategy and validated our approach. The work ahead is ambitious, but the foundation is solid.
We are committed to building the platform finance and operations teams can rely on when the stakes are high. One that protects margins, restores trust in data, and enables durable growth.
Thank you for being part of this journey. We look forward to building the future of financial precision together.
Sincerely,
Alex Babin, CEO, Hercules
* Non-deterministic AI means the system does not always give the exact same answer to the same question. It looks at context and patterns, then makes a best guess each time. A deterministic approach means the same input always produces the same output. That makes results predictable, easy to test, and easy to trust. It is ideal for critical processes where accuracy, repeatability, and auditability matter.
