New Funding Enables Vareto to Accelerate Product Development for its Strategic Finance Platform and Expand Product Categories
Vareto, the strategic finance platform, announced its emergence from stealth with $24 million in total funding. GV (formerly Google Ventures) led the Series A, with participation from existing investor Menlo Ventures, who led the seed round. Additional angel investors include unicorn founders and chief financial officers at top technology companies. The funding will be used to expand the hiring of its product and engineering teams in order to accelerate platform development.
“Feedback from customers has been positive, and we are optimistic that Vareto is building a product that will have an outsized impact on finance teams.”
Vareto was founded in 2020 by Kat Orekhova and Lalit Singh in response to their observation that the needs of Finance Planning and Accounting (FP&A) teams were not met with existing software. With backgrounds in product and operations leadership at some of the world’s largest tech organizations, they set out to build a strategic finance platform for the enterprise but with a consumer look and feel. Despite specialized software being used at nearly every mature company, current software offerings do not adequately allow teams to seamlessly work across planning and reporting cycles despite the link between them.
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According to a 2019 SAP survey1, FP&A teams spend 75% of their time on manual, backward-looking tasks and only 25% generating insights and driving action. Much of this time is spent in disconnected spreadsheets despite having purchased purpose-built reporting and planning software because of steep learning curves. Additionally, according to a 2021 Constellation Research report2, organizations without a centralized planning platform spend as much as 50% of their “planning and analysis” time collecting and validating data due to data versioning and reconciliation challenges. Vareto flattens the learning curve for finance teams with its powerful and intuitive experience, collaboration features, and native integrations.
“FP&A professionals we’ve spoken with consistently describe an environment where planning and reporting processes span multiple software applications because current options aren’t nimble or user-friendly enough to get all team members working from the same place,” said co-founder Kat Orekhova. “We founded Vareto because we want to help companies operate better, and we believe this is possible only when reporting is automated and planning is streamlined. This is the only way that finance and executive teams can focus on driving the company forward rather than looking in the rearview mirror. We are thrilled that GV and Menlo Ventures share in our vision and are joining us as we build an enterprise-grade finance platform with consumer-grade delight.”
“Before Vareto, my team was spending hours pulling data from multiple systems and making manual calculations in different spreadsheets. Answering a question meant waiting several days while my team cobbled something together,” said Ankur Verma, CFO at Mindtickle. “Now, I’m able to see a 360-degree view of my business and compare performance to operational plan all in one place. My team found Vareto to be intuitive from the start and we love their finance-specific modeling and reporting features.”
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“Kat and Lalit bring an authenticity that we love to see in founders,” said Naomi Pilosof Ionita, Partner at Menlo Ventures. “They have seen where incumbents fall short and appreciate that finance teams need modern tooling to work more cross-functionally, marrying both financial and operating metrics to measure the health of the business and inform better decisions.”
“Vareto’s approach to reporting and planning strikes the critical balance between solving sophisticated enterprise problems with user-centric design,” said Tyson Clark, General Partner at GV. “Feedback from customers has been positive, and we are optimistic that Vareto is building a product that will have an outsized impact on finance teams.”
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