Adaptive Insights Sucks Up $75M To End Excel Woes

Chief financial officers and corporate accountants spend the bulk of their time in Microsoft Excel. Many CFOs I meet are proud of the complexity of their spreadsheets and have Excel templates they've carried from company to company. Spreadsheets with many thousands of rows, complex pivot tables, and long formulas are something of a CFO right of passage.

You'd have thought that there is no other option, but in this day and age, with cloud solutions readily integrated with each other, there are other ways for CFOs to do their budgeting. This is the space that Adaptive Insights falls into. The company delivers a corporate performance management (CPM) solution. What that means is that they offer capabilities for budgeting, forecasting, reporting, consolidation, dashboards, and business intelligence that aim to empower finance, sales, and other business leaders with readily actioned insights.

Adaptive Insights is a high profile vendor in the space and is trumpeting the fact that its solution is used by high profile customers such as AAA, Boston Scientific , CORT, Konica Minolta , NetSuite, Philips , and Siemens . Adaptive sells its product directly and is also available through channel ecosystem including partners Accenture , Armanino, BDO, Cohn Reznick, Intacct, KPMG, McGladrey, and Plex Systems. NetSuite also offers Adaptive Insights as its NetSuite Financial Planning Module. The company claims that more than 2,700 companies in 85 countries use Adaptive Insights.

Adaptive is today announcing a new $75 million investment round. New investor JMI Equity joins the round along with existing investors Norwest Venture Partners, ONSET Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Cardinal Venture Capital, Monitor Ventures, and Information Venture Partners. JMI Equity is focused on high-growth enterprise software companies and previously backed Eloqua and ServiceNow.

There is no doubt that in this high-paced age, finance executives need more efficient and robust tools that spreadsheets to plot the course their organizations should take. Adaptive is riding this wave and growing strongly. The company claims 50 percent year-on-year growth in terms of total annual recurring revenue and international growth of 75 percent in Q1 alone.

While Adaptive is probably best known for its success with high-growth technologies companies (FireEye, LinkedIn, and ZenDesk among them), it is also winning accounts in more traditional industries - Coca-Cola , American Family Insurance, and Southwest Gas are all customers.

Adaptive has a huge opportunity in front of it - this $75 million will give it fuel for the road ahead.