Vena Excel-First Midmarket Strategy

Vena is winning by selling finance teams a safer version of the spreadsheet habits they already trust. Instead of asking a mid-market team to rebuild years of models in a new interface, it keeps Excel on screen and fixes the painful parts underneath, like pulling live data from ERP, CRM, and HRIS, controlling permissions, and stopping version chaos. That makes adoption easier, especially for companies too small for Anaplan style complexity but too large to run planning by email and CSV.

• Vena started as an Excel add-in and sells into privately held mid-market companies at about $60,000 ACV. That buyer usually wants better planning workflows, but not a full process rewrite or a $300,000 to $450,000 enterprise deployment.
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• Runway, Equals, and Causal are built around a different bet. They try to become the place where models are created, shared, and explored directly, with browser collaboration, dashboards, and new modeling abstractions that reduce dependence on native Excel files.
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• This is really a segmentation choice. Causal explicitly grouped Vena with tools that sit on top of Excel or Google Sheets, while positioning itself as a separate horizontal modeling system. Vena then extends from FP&A into sales, headcount, and ops planning without forcing users to abandon the grid they know.
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The next step is a broader Microsoft centric planning suite. As planning spreads from finance into sales, workforce, and operations, Vena can keep using Excel familiarity as the wedge, then add dashboards, AI assistance, and cross functional workflows on top. That expands its market without requiring customers to make the cultural leap that newer spreadsheet replacements demand.