Joe Zhou

Despite the rapid advancements in financial technology, accounts receivable (AR) remains a starkly inefficient workflow, with many companies still relying on manual, error-prone processes to manage their contract-to-invoice and invoice-to-cash cycles.

As a result, finance teams struggle with data entry mistakes, delayed invoice reconciliation, and slow payment cycles, leading to unnecessary cash flow bottlenecks. They also lack sufficient real-time insights, which forces them to take a reactive rather than proactive approach to financial management — consequently making it difficult to anticipate late payments or assess a client's ability to pay on time.

Recognizing these gaps in the market, Joe Zhou saw an opportunity to modernize AR using artificial intelligence. He's the co-founder and CTO of Atlas, a proprietary automation system that's redefining AR through agentic solutions and automation of contract-to-cash cycles. In doing so, Atlas is empowering businesses to save valuable finance time for finance leaders and increase cash-on-hand, fueling business growth.

Joe Zhou: A Background of Excellence

After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with degrees in computer science, data science, and mathematics, Zhou started his career at industry-leading companies like Google and Snap. There, he led high-impact projects that improved user engagement and product performance for billions of users globally.

One of his biggest projects was with Snap, where he introduced an augmented reality engagement funnel designed to improve the user feedback loop and increase the adoption of Snapchat's viral augmented reality (AR) lenses. Zhou's team managed to achieve a 25% global increase in AR usage — the brand's largest jump in six years.

Zhou also spent time at Intuit, working on QuickBooks and Mint transaction categorization. There, he saw how a lack of real-time insights into payment risks forced businesses into reactive financial management. Simultaneously, they had to handle a vast amount of financial data from diverse sources without robust systems of categorization and classification in place.

He realized that traditional AR systems, while accepted as the industry standard, didn't measure up to the demands of modern business. It was this realization that formed the basis of Atlas.

AI-Powered Automation: A Smarter Approach to Accounts Receivable

Atlas is an AI-powered AR automation platform that eliminates manual data entry errors, enables faster invoicing and reconciliation, gives finance leaders a source of truth for revenue, and increases cash on hand. The end goal is simple: Atlas is designed to get businesses paid.

It works by seamlessly integrating emerging tech like natural language processing, machine learning, various frontier models and predictive analytics to automate every stage of the AR workflow and save finance teams time, resources, and stress. For example, it can scan a contract and automatically generate a detailed, accurate invoice that you can quickly review and send.

Key to this approach is Atlas' continuous learning model: The more invoices and contract data the system processes, the smarter it becomes.

One of its strongest benefits is that it plugs and plays with existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems like NetSuite, SAP, and Microsoft Dynamics. It also connects to Slack, email, and your CRM so that you can centralize customer communications and manage them easily. Atlas eliminates the need for manual invoice matching, accelerating cash flow and saving teams time and resources.

The result is a unified, AI-first approach that makes it easy to deploy and maintain highly configurable workflows for different industries.

The Impact of AI-Driven AR on Finance Teams

Businesses are already embracing Atlas and seeing powerful results, with customers leveraging it to eliminate manual invoice matching and free their teams to focus on other tasks. They're also seeing accelerated cash flow, sometimes by days or even weeks.

"We are reshaping the $125 trillion B2B payments market and helping free up $3 trillion in annual locked cashflow that hinders global growth as a result of antiquated payment systems," Zhou notes.

After implementing Atlas, one startup experienced a 43% reduction in days sales outstanding (meaning they were able to collect payments significantly faster) as their spreadsheet usage dropped by 71%.

"Atlas is about freeing teams from busywork so they can focus on real growth," Zhou says. "Innovating in AI isn't about just increasing efficiency — it's about enabling resource reallocations to focus on creative and strategic thinking."

With Atlas, Joe Zhou has successfully found a way to consistently eliminate human errors and delays in payment cycles — allowing businesses trapped in outdated processes to finally reach their full potential.

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