Vareto Inc., a new startup with a platform designed to make enterprise finance teams’ work easier, today launched from stealth mode after raising $24 million in funding.

Vareto raised the capital over two rounds led by Alphabet Inc.’s GV venture capital arm and Menlo Ventures, respectively. The startup is also backed by no fewer than 40 angel investors, including senior executives at Salesforce.com Inc., Microsoft Corp., Splunk Inc. and other tech firms.

Vareto’s cloud platform is designed to speed up two tasks that take up a significant amount of time for finance teams: reporting and planning. Reporting, in the context of enterprise accounting, is the process of creating a sharable overview of a company’s financial performance during a given time period. Planning is the part of finance teams’ work where they set business goals, such as a revenue growth target, and identify what steps must be taken by the company to meet the objective.

Both tasks can take weeks to complete in a large enterprise. Creating a report that summarizes how much revenue a company generated last quarter is a simple task in theory, but in practice, it represents a major undertaking. The main source of complexity is the fact that large organizations’ earnings data is often scattered across multiple business units and systems. Finance teams have to individually extract the needed information from each system to craft an accurate report.

Vareto promises to ease the process. Its platform provides integrations for Snowflake Inc.’s cloud-based data platform, Salesforce and many of the other systems in which organizations store their business data. Once they collect the needed information, finance teams can turn it into easier to understand charts using Vareto’s built-in data visualization tools.

The platform also helps with financial planning, which in many cases takes even more time than reporting. Crafting a financial plan often requires companies to draw on data from a larger number of systems than a standard earnings report necessitates, leading to more complexity. There’s also more number-crunching work involved.

Vareto provides a spreadsheet engine that allows finance teams to organize the data points that go into a financial plan and run calculations. When there’s a large amount of data to navigate, a built-in search bar helps users find the specific pieces of information they require.

Vareto has combined its core finance features with a set of collaboration capabilities designed to make it easier to share reports once they are ready. Business users can control who has access to a document through a centralized console.

The need to collect and process data scattered across different systems is a challenge outside the finance department as well. In response, there has emerged an entire ecosystem of companies with products designed to ease the task of analyzing data spread across multiple applications. Two of them, Fivetran Inc. and Matillion Ltd., raised funding last month. 

Vareto’s platform is launching into a crowded field of enterprise finance tools. Oracle Corp., SAP SE and publicly traded Anaplan Inc. are some of the companies with products that provide features for preparing both financial reports and plans. The fact that the startup has raised funding from prominent investors such as GV represents a high-profile vote of confidence in its ability to compete with the market’s incumbent players. 

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