More than one billion people use Microsoft's excel in the world today, and 80% of them are small business people who use the software to keep track of their finances. A startup called DataRails has built a set of financial planning and analytics tools for those users, so that they can get more out of their numbers on excel, and is announcing some funding on the back of that.
The New York/Israeli firm has raised a Series B of $50 million, which it plans to use to continue adding more functionality to its existing product, including more predictive modeling capabilities. DataRails will continue to focus on small businesses.
Didi Gurfinkel, the co-founder and CEO, saidPredictive analytics is the holy grail and gives them access to the kind ofFunctionality that has long been available to them.
Qumra Capital is leading the round, with new backers La Maison Partners and ClalTech, as well as previous backers ORYZN and Vintage Investment Partners. Gurfinkel, who co-founded the company with Eyal Cohen, said that the number went up three-fold since its last round of $43.5 million, and that its bigger goal.
Gurfinkel wouldn't give an exact number for either of the metrics, but he did say that the company's revenues in the last year grew 5x.
DataRails had spotted an opportunity to provide tools to improve the performance of excel, knowing that it was widespread in its use to track budgets, P&Ls, balance sheets.
The initial focus was on providing tools to help organizations manage financial reporting and auditing for purposes like taxes and compliance, but not financial planning. Gurfinkel said that DataRails expanded beyond that becauseanalytics was more interesting.
When a finance director or CFO wakes up in the morning, they want to see something new and understand something they didn't know before. Compliance tools are a part of their responsibilities, but they don't really want to be the smartest person in the room.
Gurfinkel said that it's a very lucrative area to target, with an estimated market value of $ 7.8 billion in the U.S. alone. The company has a more diverse set of products that use the same connections and information as the original product.
Gurfinkel said that the company does not plan to build its own spreadsheet software, preferring instead to build on top of the most popular packages in use today. That insulates DataRails from being dependent on Microsoft, but also positions it as an attractive startup to be snapped up by one of these platform providers as they continue to look for more value-added services and engagement and long-term stickiness with their user bases.
DataRails is empowering teams in every organization with deep business intelligence. Sivan Shamri Dahan, managing partner at Qumra Capital, said in a statement that for the first time, all financial data is uploaded to the cloud.
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