Forecasting as Finance System of Record
Andy Su, co-founder of Pry, on building the "Figma of finance"
The key lesson from Carta is that spreadsheet replacement usually starts by becoming the trusted system of record for one painful workflow, not by trying to beat Excel at everything. Carta won because cap tables moved from loose files and email threads into a structured product with ownership history, permissions, transfers, and tax logic built in. Pry is pointing to the same path for startup planning, where the first wedge is setting up a usable forecast and then keeping teams inside one live model instead of passing spreadsheets around.
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Carta expanded from cap table management into 409A valuations, tender offers, transfers, and tax handling because once the equity record lives in one system, adjacent workflows get much easier to automate. That is the real analogy for Pry. Forecasting can become the front door to budgeting, collaboration, benchmarking, and eventually payments or lending.
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The spreadsheet replacement market splits in two. Some companies, like Vena, sell to finance teams that want to stay in Excel but add permissions, integrations, and version control. Others, like Pry and Equals, try to move the work itself into a new collaborative product. That means the real competition is not only Excel, but also Excel enhancement vendors.
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The go to market implication is that adoption comes through a concrete deliverable, not a generic productivity pitch. Pry describes affordable setup from scratch for founders who do not know how to build a model. Equals found that broad spreadsheet messaging attracted too many unrelated users, and only improved once it narrowed to specific repeatable use cases.
This category will keep moving from static files to finance systems of record. The winners will be the products that own the first model, connect to the source data, and make collaboration safe enough that founders, finance leads, investors, and operators stop exporting the real work back into Excel except for edge cases.