“It feels terrible.” That pretty much sums up one CFO’s sentiment about leading finance at a pre-revenue company. The CFO is Brian Merker, finance chief of Ontario, Canada-based Horizon Aircraft.

Horizon is creating a hybrid electric plane with vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) for short regional transportation of roughly 300 to 500 miles.

The company has raised $15 million CAD (over $11 million) in the last 12 months, and $30 million CAD since it was founded in 2013. Those 30 million Canadian dollars include a $6.7 million investment from Canso, a Canadian investment firm specializing in aircraft companies. Horizon also landed $2 million USD from the Initiative for Sustainable Aviation Technology (INSAT), a sustainable aviation fund run by the Canadian government. Horizon went public in 2024, according to Merker, so it could access capital markets.

“I generally don’t like spending money,” Merker told CFO Brew. “But I do believe in the product, and it becomes a mission to support the technical team.” That means Horizon needs to continue to hire people and order equipment and supplies. “Priority one is supporting the team in building the aircraft.”

Keep reading.—JK

As in a confusing celebrity breakup announcement, UPS is pulling away from its longtime partner, Amazon, but keeping things juuuust open enough to stay mutually beneficial.

In other words: They’re consciously uncoupling. Or, in UPS CEO Carol Tomé’s words:

“We’re in the final six months of our Amazon accelerated glide-down plan.”

The packaging giant is cutting 30,000 jobs, part of a wider scale-back of its partnership with Amazon, its largest customer, and a planned pivot to higher-margin shipments.

In January 2025, UPS said it would cut volumes for Amazon by over 50% by the second half of 2026. At the time, Tomé noted that, despite being UPS’s largest customer, Amazon was not its most profitable one.

Keep reading.—NP

Phone books, paper maps, and pagers feel like antiquated relics of the past. Some executives think enterprise resource planning (ERP) software may soon join that list.

More than one-third (36%) of C-suite executives believe the current traditional ERP model will soon become obsolete “in favor of a composable, modular, flexible, API-driven, best-of-breed model,” according to a recent Rimini Street report. Almost the same percentage (33%) replied that they believe the traditional ERP model will evolve with an agentic makeover in the future, while three in 10 said the current model will receive “incremental enhancements.” The findings are based on a Censuswide survey of 4,295 global C-suite executives.

What exactly is ERP 2.0? IT Brew caught up with Eric Kimberling, CEO and founder of Third Stage Consulting Group, to understand how ERP models may evolve. Historically, he said, the ERP model was a single system that “pulled together” a company’s entire operations; however, this once-critical software may begin playing a smaller role.

Keep reading on IT Brew.—BM

Skip the noise and cut to the jobs that matter. CollabWORK curates openings from top employers and shares them directly in trusted spaces like CFO Brew—click here to see the full list for readers like you.

• Vice President - IFRS Tax Accounting at Morgan Stanley
• Chief Accounting Officer at Unity Technologies
• Tax Senior at Deloitte LLP
• Interim Senior Financial Accountant / Accounting Manager at RGP
• Senior Project Accountant at Southland Industries