Equals: Figma for Finance Analysts
Bobby Pinero, CEO of Equals, on bringing joy to finance teams
The real wedge here is not finance software, it is habit formation. The strongest products in this category win by becoming the place where a specific worker does their core thinking every day, then expanding outward only after that workflow is indispensable. Equals is trying to do for analysts what Figma did for designers, start with the person closest to the work, then turn that daily use into a broader system of record for the team.
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Equals is deliberately built around the analyst workflow, live data in, spreadsheet analysis, dashboard out. That matters because finance teams still bounce between SQL, Excel, and BI tools, and a product that collapses those steps into one place can create much stronger daily usage than a planning tool used once a month.
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The Figma analogy is less about design being a big market, and more about winning an intolerant minority. Figma first became the tool designers insisted on using, then spread to PMs and engineers because files became the source of truth. Equals is following the same pattern by starting with finance power users, then moving into founders and ops.
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There is a clear contrast with Vena. Vena has built a real business by staying close to Excel and expanding across planning workflows in the Microsoft stack, which shows finance can support a large software company. Equals is making the more ambitious bet that a new daily workspace for analysis can pull usage away from both Excel and BI earlier in a company’s life.
The next phase is turning analyst love into management visibility. As dashboards, AI assisted data access, and repeatable reporting workflows improve, products like Equals can move from being a power user tool to being the default operating layer for finance and adjacent teams. That is how obsession in one persona becomes durable expansion across the company.