Over the past year, we have been hard at work building the platform that finance teams deserve. Today, we are excited to launch Vareto, announce our funding, and thank all of our supporters. You can read more coverage here in TechCrunch.
What is Vareto?
Vareto is a strategic finance platform. We build software for finance and executive teams to help them automate routine processes such as monthly business reporting and streamline collaborative processes such as annual planning.
Longer term, we're on a mission to change how companies operate.
We believe that planning and operating are two sides of the same coin. By making it easier for companies to evaluate business performance and plan for the future, Vareto is fundamentally changing how companies are run.
The problem
It is hard to run a business effectively when there's a big time lag between events happening and our ability to respond to them. Yet that's exactly what executives face on a daily basis.
Today, company leaders make their most important decisions using out-of-date information.
Why? The typical enterprise company spans thousands of employees, a hundred countries, a dozen legal entities, and numerous business lines. Even a basic business question like, "what was revenue last month?" is nontrivial to answer because it requires pulling data from multiple sources and getting input from multiple teams.
Even more cumbersome is the annual planning process, which takes 4-6 months on average. The objective is simple: set business targets for the following year and a resource plan (headcount and budget) needed to get there. The hard part is the planning cycle itself. It involves hundreds of stakeholders, numerous disconnected spreadsheets and decks (many with out-of-date data), tops-down assumptions, bottoms-up inputs, and a whole calendar of meetings and approvals.
Despite the finance team's heroic efforts, business reporting takes weeks and annual planning takes months.
Between the annual planning cycle, quarterly board forecasts, and the steady cadence of business reporting, it's no wonder that finance teams have little time for forward-looking, strategic projects.
According to a 2019 SAP survey, FP&A teams spend 75% of their time on manual, backward looking tasks and only 25% generating insights and driving action.
We believe this should be the other way around, but finance teams can't make this change alone. They need better tools.
Technology has improved the work lives of other functions such as Design, Sales, and Marketing, but Finance teams are still remarkably underserved.
The finance toolkit today is incredibly limited. As one example, consider company planning. This is an inherently collaborative process that involves people just as much as data and financial modeling. Yet finance teams don't have collaborative software and hence they do planning using a web of spreadsheets, decks, and emails. Even if they have a legacy planning system, it tends to act more as a repository for the final numbers rather than a place where the planning process itself takes place.
Product
We built Vareto to give Finance and executive teams the tools they deserve.
Vareto is a next-generation finance platform that powers company planning, reporting, and operational decision-making from start to finish. Our product brings beautiful, elegant design and data intelligence into the FP&A process so that companies can spend more time discussing the future and less time documenting the past.
Investors
We are grateful to Naomi Pilosof Ionita, Grace Ge, and the whole team at Menlo Ventures for leading our $4M seed round last summer. They invested when we were pre-revenue, pre-product, and pre-team. Thank you for being incredible partners and continuing to support us each day.
We’re also honored to have Tyson Clark and Karim Faris from GV lead our recent $20M series A. When Tyson asked us about circular references and spreadsheet architecture, we knew this partnership was meant to be. Thank you for joining us on this journey, and for the many doors you’ve already opened.
Finally, we are grateful for the support of FOG Ventures and our 40+ amazing angel investors and advisors. We could not have built this product without the visionary guidance of CFOs such as Mark Hawkins (Salesforce), Dave Wehner (Facebook), Jason Child (Splunk), Jeff Epstein (Oracle), and Michael Linford (Affirm). Thank you also to the C-suite executives and unicorn founders who have backed us: Anne Raimondi (Asana), Guy Podjarny (Snyk), Nick Mehta (Gainsight), and many others.
Team
Over the past year, Vareto has grown from 2 founders to 20+ people across the United States, Canada, and Europe. We are incredibly proud of our team members, who come from a diverse set of backgrounds and have past experiences ranging from strategic finance, to deep enterprise and delightful consumer software.
We are growing fast and hiring across many different roles. If our values resonate with you and you'd like to learn more about what it's like to work at Vareto, we'd love to talk to you!
