Sacra estimates Vena hit $116M in annual recurring revenue in 2024, up 25% year-over-year. The company's growth has been driven by strong adoption among mid-market finance teams, with average contract values around $60,000 per year.

Vena has successfully expanded beyond its core FP&A offering into sales forecasting, headcount planning, and operational planning, helping drive expansion revenue within its 1,700+ customer base. Key enterprise logos include Nike, Kansas City Chiefs, Coca-Cola Consolidated, and WWF-Canada.

The company's Excel-centric platform resonates particularly well with finance teams at privately-held, midmarket companies that need more robust planning capabilities but aren't ready for enterprise solutions like Anaplan or OneStream at $300K-450K ACV.

Vena's focus on the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, with deep integrations into PowerPoint, Power BI and Dynamics 365 Business Central, positions it well to capture share among the 400M paid Microsoft users who rely heavily on Excel for financial planning and analysis.

Vena has raised over $450 million in total funding, including a significant $300 million Series C round in 2021 led by Vista Equity Partners.

Other key investors include JMI Equity and Centana Growth Partners, who participated in earlier funding rounds.

Vena was founded in 2011 in Toronto by Don Mal, George Papayiannis, and Rishi Grover as an Excel add-in to help finance teams do planning and analysis directly in their spreadsheets while maintaining data integrity and version control.

Vena found product-market fit as a financial planning platform for mid-market finance teams who loved working in Excel but needed better workflow management, data integration, and collaboration capabilities. The founders recognized that while finance professionals were deeply attached to Excel's flexibility, they struggled with its limitations around sharing, permissions, and connecting to source systems.

The product works by connecting Excel to a central database through a web interface. When users log in, they see their assigned tasks and can click to generate personalized Excel views from templates. As they work in familiar Excel, their changes save automatically to the database. Built-in workflows manage the review and approval process.

Beyond core budgeting and forecasting, Vena expanded to support financial close management, sales performance planning, and operational planning - all while maintaining Excel as the primary interface.

The platform integrates with ERP systems, CRM tools, and HR software to automatically populate spreadsheets with actual data, enabling finance teams to spend less time on data entry and more time on analysis.

Vena is a subscription SaaS company that enhances Excel for corporate finance teams through a cloud platform that adds workflow management, version control, and database connectivity to existing spreadsheets.

The company prices based on number of users, with two tiers: Professional starting at $30,000/year and Complete at up to $140,000/year, plus implementation fees around $30,000.

The platform targets mid-market companies that rely heavily on Excel for financial planning and analysis but need enterprise features like permissioning and audit trails.

By preserving Excel as the interface while adding enterprise capabilities, Vena removes adoption friction common to competing solutions that force teams to learn new interfaces.

Vena's land-and-expand strategy focuses on starting with core FP&A teams then expanding to adjacent functions like sales planning and workforce planning.

The company drives expansion through pre-built templates for specific use cases and industries, allowing customers to quickly implement new planning processes.

Integration with Microsoft 365 creates additional stickiness, as Vena connects Excel models to PowerPoint for board presentations and Power BI for visualization. This positions Vena as the complete planning platform for Microsoft-centric finance organizations looking to modernize without abandoning Excel.

Vena operates in the financial planning & analysis (FP&A) software market, where its Excel-centric approach positions it between traditional spreadsheet-based workflows and enterprise planning platforms.

At the high end, Anaplan and OneStream target large enterprises with $300-450K/year contracts, offering proprietary interfaces and complex modeling capabilities for organizations with quarterly SEC reporting requirements. These platforms emphasize multi-dimensional planning across departments but require significant training and implementation resources.

Prophix and Planful compete directly with Vena in the mid-market segment, targeting companies with $50-150K annual software budgets. Prophix emphasizes user-friendly interfaces and strong customer support, while Planful offers real-time insights and collaboration features. DataRails provides a similar Excel-based approach but focuses on smaller organizations.

A new wave of FP&A platforms is emerging with different approaches to the Excel paradigm. Runway ($34M raised) and Equals ($23M raised) aim to move teams entirely off spreadsheets, offering more intuitive interfaces and collaborative features. Causal (acquired by Lucanet) provides a visual modeling environment focused on scenario planning.

The competitive dynamics are shifting as vendors take different positions on Excel's role in financial planning. While enterprise platforms push proprietary interfaces and modern challengers advocate abandoning spreadsheets entirely, mid-market players like Vena bet on enhancing rather than replacing Excel workflows. This reflects a fundamental split in the market between organizations seeking to maintain existing Excel processes versus those ready to adopt entirely new planning paradigms.

Vena has tailwinds from the widespread adoption of Microsoft 365 in enterprise and the increasing need for connected planning across finance, sales and operations teams. The company has opportunities to expand beyond its core FP&A market into adjacent areas like operational planning, sales performance management, and AI-powered analytics.

With 400M paid Microsoft 365 users globally, Vena can expand beyond finance teams to become the default planning platform across the Microsoft ecosystem. The company's Excel-native interface and deep Microsoft integrations position it to capture planning use cases in sales, HR, and operations teams already using Microsoft tools. Recent integrations with PowerPoint and Power BI demonstrate momentum in becoming the comprehensive planning layer for Microsoft 365.

As organizations seek to connect financial and operational planning, Vena can expand from core FP&A into areas like workforce planning, sales capacity planning, and supply chain planning. The company's recent move into sales performance management shows early success in this direction. By connecting planning across functions while maintaining Excel as the interface, Vena addresses a key pain point for mid-market companies seeking enterprise-grade capabilities without the complexity of platforms like Anaplan.

Vena's access to customer planning data across finance, sales and operations creates opportunities to expand into AI-powered analytics and automation. The launch of Vena Copilot demonstrates early steps in using AI to automate manual FP&A tasks. This positions Vena to capture value from the growing demand for AI capabilities in planning and analysis while maintaining its familiar Excel-based workflow.

Excel dependency becomes a liability: While Vena's Excel-centric approach is currently a strength, it could become a significant weakness as younger finance professionals increasingly prefer modern interfaces. The next generation of finance leaders may view Excel as legacy technology, potentially limiting Vena's future growth. Microsoft's own improvements to Excel could also reduce the need for Vena's value-add features.

Mid-market squeeze: Vena's positioning between high-end platforms like OneStream and newer tools like Equals puts them at risk of getting squeezed from both directions. Enterprise vendors could move downmarket with simplified versions while newer, more intuitive platforms could move upmarket with added features. The $60K ACV price point may become increasingly difficult to defend against lower-priced alternatives.

Microsoft ecosystem risk: Vena's deep integration with Microsoft 365 creates concerning platform dependency. If Microsoft decides to build similar FP&A capabilities directly into their suite or acquires a competitor, Vena's core value proposition could be severely undermined. Microsoft's history of competing with ecosystem partners makes this a particularly acute risk.