Narrow wedges will win FP&A
Taimur Abdaal, CEO and co-founder of Causal, on the future of the "better spreadsheet"
The macro downturn exposed that mid market FP&A was never a simple software sale, it was a crowded budget fight against both Excel and a wave of near lookalike vendors. Causal had been selling $18K to $36K annual contracts into roughly 100 to 500 employee companies, where buyers felt clear pain around manual data pulls and budgeting workflows. Once budgets tightened, those nice to have workflow gains became harder to fund, especially with multiple modern FP&A tools chasing the same finance leader.
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Causal originally found strong fit in Series C companies because finance teams could save one or two days a month by pulling live actuals from systems like QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, Salesforce, and data warehouses instead of updating spreadsheets by hand. That ROI was tangible, but still sat below harder budget priorities once the market turned.
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The segment filled up quickly. Causal described three lanes of rivals, Excel overlay products like Vena, vertical FP&A systems like Mosaic and Pigment, and newer browser based tools like Pry, Runway, and Equals. Those companies were all pitching many of the same mid market finance teams, which raised sales friction and made differentiation harder.
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Competitors responded by moving to clearer wedges. Pry went downmarket with self serve pricing for startups. Equals narrowed its message to reporting and lightweight BI use cases after seeing horizontal spreadsheet positioning pull in too many buyer types. Vena kept winning midmarket teams by staying inside Excel instead of forcing a tool change.
The next phase of the category favors sharper positioning over broad better spreadsheet ambition. The winners are likely to be the tools that either own a narrow entry point, like startup planning or Excel centric FP&A, or become the place where finance and operating teams both work from live data, not just where finance uploads a budget.