Financial software provider DataRails Inc. today announced that it has closed a $50 million investment led by Qumra Capital, in what marks the third funding round closed by the startup over the past year.

New York-based DataRails says that the milestone comes after revenue grew fivefold in 2021. In parallel, the startup’s installed base grew to several hundred companies.

DataRails provides a software platform that simplifies financial planning and analysis, or FP&A, for small and midsized businesses. FP&A encompasses key accounting activities such as setting an organization’s operating budget and forecasting revenue. Many companies’ teams perform such tasks using Excel spreadsheets. 

Spreadsheets provide many features for organizing financial data and also simplify certain related tasks, such as revenue forecasting. But Excel files can be difficult to manage. An accounting team may have upwards of hundreds of spreadsheets, which makes it difficult to find financial data.

DataRails’ platform allows companies to centralize financial data that might otherwise be scattered across hundreds of spreadsheets in a single location. The platform also collects information from business applications, such as enterprise resource planning software. According to DataRails, centralizing data in one platform improves the productivity of finance teams.

Tasks such as creating a revenue forecast often require finance teams to gather a large amount of data. If the data is scattered across many different spreadsheets and applications, the task of collecting information can require a significant amount of time. DataRails says that its platform’s centralized approach to organizing data speeds up finance teams’ work. 

“More than 80% of small and medium-sized businesses use Excel for financial planning and analysis, and experience the pain of manual work, broken processes, and scattered data,” said DataRails co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Didi Gurfinkel. “The need for real-time consolidation, collaboration, and extraction of financial insights is huge, with the US market alone estimated at $7.8B in 2022.”

Besides data management, the startup also promises to simplify a number of related tasks with its platform. DataRails’ platform can visualize financial data in graphs and automatically update a chart with new information when it becomes available. A built-in analytics tool enables users to simulate the financial impact of business decisions, such as a change to product pricing, before implementing them.

DataRails’ plans following its latest $50 million funding round place an emphasis on feature development. According to TechCrunch, the startup seeks to expand its platform’s focus beyond the finance department to other teams in areas such marketing, sales and human resources. The startup intends to expand its go-to-market efforts in parallel. 

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