On April 27th, 2021, Vena announced raising a CAD$ 300 million C Round led by Vista Equity Partners. Vena’s prior investors, JMI Equity and Centana Growth Partners, remain active investors and Vista adds two board members, Managing Director Kim Eaton and co-Head of Vista’s Foundation Fund, Marc Teillon. Vista’s current Foundation Fund IV was raised in 2020 and is approximately $4.5 billion, making this US $240 million+ investment a significant portion of this portfolio.
Vena is a business planning, budgeting, and forecasting solution that uses Excel as a front-end interface while coordinating data through a back-end Vena Growth Engine. Since it was founded in 2011, Vena has stood out in the business planning market as a solution that was built to support Excel as a front-end interface while supporting the governance of collaborative consolidation and close management, account reconciliations, and intercompany transactions through back-end coordination that synchronizes the user experience. Vena has traditionally had a strong relationship with the Microsoft technology stack, including running on Azure and supporting Power BI. Over the past decade, this technology support has evolved to support all major data sources used for finance planning. Vena provides a horizontal solution, but has experience in verticals including Banking, Healthcare, Higher Education, Insurance, Manufacturing, and Software.
Over the past decade, Vena has provided supported multiple customers that have achieved 500+% ROI on their investments as organizations have been able to use Vena’s business planning approach to save time, add governance to business reporting by ensuring users always have approved data, provide repeatable structure to previous ad-hoc finance and accounting reports, and accelerate executive time-to-action.
With this investment, Vena Solutions plans to pursue growth. Given the size of this investment, Amalgam Insights expects to see the acceleration of global sales channels as well as increasing verticalization to take full advantage of the value created by developing more dedicated industry-aligned solutions. Given the current $9 billion market cap that Anaplan enjoys on roughly $450 million in annual revenue and the success of Workday Adaptive Planning, it is not difficult to imagine Vena achieving both similar growth and valuations with its new round of funding. Amalgam Insights believes that Vena’s approach is potentially well-suited to general business planning challenges beyond finance and operations, but could be improved additional investment in native data connectors to compete with Workday, Anaplan, and insightsoftware.
Recommendations
Vena Solutions continues to be a business planning solution that Amalgam Insights recommends, as its experience in providing an Excel-based planning solution is unparalleled in the market and its user adoption metrics are Best-in-Class because of its approach. Companies seeking to quickly scale their finance, sales, or workforce planning initiatives should consider Vena. With this increased investment, potential clients should ask Vena for plans on localization, vertical solutions, new products and integrations, and regional partners to support global implementations as the financial barriers to pursue both innovation and growth have obviously been removed.