Runway makes FP&A companywide
Siqi Chen, CEO of Runway, on building browser-based collaborative FP&A
The real upside for Runway is not faster budgeting, it is turning financial understanding from a finance only activity into a company wide habit. The pattern already showed up in analytics and design. Amplitude made product data easier for PMs and designers to inspect without waiting on analysts. Figma put live work, comments, and version history in one browser file, which pulled more non designers into the design process. Runway is aiming to do the same for planning, so heads of product, sales, and engineering work from a shared operating model instead of private spreadsheets.
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In most companies, each department already has its own forecast in a spreadsheet. Sales tracks pipeline and conversion assumptions, marketing tracks campaign payback, engineering tracks hiring and roadmap timing. Runway’s pitch is to connect those local models to the finance model, so the official forecast reflects how teams actually run the business.
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The cultural shift comes from changing who can participate safely. Traditional spreadsheets are hard to share because sensitive fields like salaries sit next to the rest of the model, and the logic is usually understandable only to the builder. Browser based permissions, shared pages, drafts, and scenario workflows make planning readable and editable by more people without breaking the model.
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Comparable products show how this expands over time. Figma spread from designers to developers, marketing, and reviewers because the file lived in one browser workspace with comments and history. Modern finance tools like Equals and Pry are chasing the same pattern in analysis and planning, with dashboards, shared pages, and live connectors that make finance work legible outside the finance team.
If this works, FP&A stops being quarterly paperwork and becomes the place where teams decide what to build, hire, and spend against. The winner in this market will be the product that becomes the default workspace for operational reasoning across the company, the same way Figma became the default workspace for design and Amplitude became the default workspace for product data.