A New System of Record for the Enterprise: Our Investment in Vareto
Naomi Ionita, Partner at Menlo Ventures @npilosof
Digital transformation has swept through nearly every department across the enterprise. However, for all the significant tech innovation in recent years, financial planning and analysis (FP&A) teams have been sadly underserved.
Vareto, which launches out of stealth today, aims to change the game for FP&A teams. Vareto’s vision is to become every company’s operating system — a single system of record that offers seamless data integration across tools, effectively marrying financial and operating metrics to capture the health of a business. With the visibility and control gained through Vareto, executives can readily identify issues, surface actionable insights and recommendations, and conduct more collaborative and accurate forecasting and planning.
The FP&A function is a critical steward of the business. These teams analyze and oversee the financial position of a company, working with the executive team to strategize and plan for future growth. But CFOs say that the de facto tools are hindering agility. Traditional planning and reporting software is clunky and rigid, not collaborative, and users find themselves being reactive rather than proactive with respect to the business. They are stuck in manual reporting cycles, working in shadow processes across a sea of one-off Excel spreadsheets. Finance teams are left to choose between expensive, incumbent software with a long time-to-value, or smaller vendors ill-equipped for the enterprise.
Compelled by the team’s vision, we led Vareto’s Seed round and are now proud to welcome GV as lead investor for the Series A. Vareto’s co-founders, Kat Orekhova and Lalit Singh bring an authenticity that we love to see as early-stage investors.
Kat was formerly the Head of Product at Ironclad, where she built collaborative workflow products for another underserved function: legal teams. Previously, she led product, data science, and finance teams at Facebook: an unusual background that is perfect for building modern FP&A software. While there, she was hand-picked to build a data science team within the finance organization. She hired some of the best people in the world to automate executive reporting, revamp the corporate revenue model, and leverage ML for forecasting. Her team saved the company hundreds of hours and achieved forecast variance within 1% on a quarterly basis during high-growth years for the company — impressive to say the least.
Lalit has extensive experience running and scaling complex operations and driving growth initiatives in consumer and enterprise businesses. He is the former COO of Udacity, where he helped turn the company around to cash flow positive, growing their B2B business by 100% year over year. Lalit has well over a decade of operational experience including senior roles at Hewlett-Packard and GE, and as a buyer of incumbent software in the space.
Kat and Lalit understood that FP&A folks have been underserved in part because of the domain expertise required to service them well — so, across the organization, they have prioritized hiring employees with finance backgrounds and empathy for the unique needs of FP&A teams.
Every management team needs an operating system that connects data and signals so that they have access to critical information, can drill down and answer questions, and make more informed decisions. Like many of Menlo’s other departmental SaaS investments (Endgame for sales, Code Signal for HR, Matik for customer success, and Carta for finance teams), we see immense opportunity in Vareto’s purpose-built solution for FP&A. We’re thrilled to continue our partnership!
We are actively investing in B2B SaaS — if you are a founder, we’d love to hear from you.
