Backstory
Mindset is the TurboTax of Social Security disability benefits. Its platform pairs AI-assisted intake with in-house attorneys and case managers to help people with mental illness, disabilities, veterans, caregivers, and the reentry population apply for SSI and SSDI benefits. A process that once took weeks now starts in under an hour, and Mindset gets paid only when a claim succeeds.
Darren Webb founded the company out of personal experience. “I'm a caregiver for a very close loved one with schizophrenia,” he says. “I tried to assist them in applying for disability benefits and just saw how much friction was in the process.” He set out to build the CLEAR of disability benefits.
When SPRCHRGR met the team, Mindset was barely a company. Its lead investor, Science Inc., had backed the idea before there was a product. “There really wasn't a business when our first round of funding came in,” Darren says. “They actually invested pre-product.” That is the point where most founders put finance off. Mindset did the opposite.
A forecast with no history to build on
Darren is candid about where he started. “I didn't grow up in spreadsheets. I didn't grow up in Excel. I'm not a finance person,” he says. What he needed first was not a clean set of books. He needed a story investors would believe.
Kip Henke came on as Mindset's fractional CFO through SPRCHRGR in 2023, when the company was in its earliest stage. He started with the narrative. “A forecast needs to tell a story,” Kip says. He mapped the pipeline, worked out what triggered revenue growth, and connected that growth to the expenses it would drive. In the early days that meant custom models built by hand, not off-the-shelf software, so the logic could flex as fast as the business was changing.
FP&A on a clean accounting foundation
From the start, the work split cleanly. Kip owned FP&A. His colleagues at SPRCHRGR owned the full accounting and finance function underneath it. That division let Mindset build forward-looking models on numbers it could trust, with monthly investor updates and quarterly board preparation delivered on time.
The Series A
By August 2024, Mindset had closed a $13M Series A led by Science Inc. Asked what role the finances played in those conversations, Darren does not hesitate. “It was huge,” he says. The model sharpened quarter after quarter, and it did more than impress investors. It taught the founder his own numbers. “Being able to actually learn it myself and then speak knowledgeably about that with the investors was huge,” Darren says.
Scaling FP&A in-house
After the raise, growth accelerated, and so did the finance workload. Mindset reached the point where it had roughly 40 hours a week of FP&A work and needed a full-time leader for it. The person Darren wanted already knew the business cold: Kip. So Mindset hired him in-house as VP of Finance.
Rather than treat that as a lost engagement, SPRCHRGR designed the handoff. Kip's SPRCHRGR clients moved to other fractional CFOs, he transitioned into Mindset over a few weeks, and the accounting relationship carried on without a gap. Darren describes it plainly: “We were thankful that we got to meet Kip through SPRCHRGR, and being able to continue the partnership after he came on board has been great.”
The split that worked from day one still works today. Mindset owns FP&A in-house. SPRCHRGR owns accounting, month-end close, and reconciliation, plus the harder technical questions Kip brings over. “I can rely on SPRCHRGR for anything accounting,” Kip says. “That's moving like a well-oiled machine.”
What's next
Mindset is launching new products for the underserved, each of which needs its own forecast and its own clean set of books. Kip is also building a data warehouse across Mindset's CRM, financial, and HR systems, and leaning on SPRCHRGR's engineering team to get there faster. All of it rests on the same foundation. “For us to build a big data warehouse, we just need to rely on the underlying data to be correct,” Kip says. “And I feel like I can do that.”
The outcome
One finance partner from two people to nearly 100 employees. SPRCHRGR has been Mindset's finance function since before it had a product.
A $13M Series A, closed with investor-ready financials. Led by Science Inc. in August 2024, backed by monthly investor updates and quarterly board prep delivered on time.
A founder who understands his own numbers. The model got sharper every quarter and gave Darren the fluency to speak to investors directly.
A clean, durable division of labor. Mindset owns FP&A in-house; SPRCHRGR owns accounting, close, and reconciliation. The same split has held through every stage.
A partnership built to keep going. New product lines, a data warehouse, and the next capital chapter all run on the finance foundation SPRCHRGR maintains.
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