Cube Software challenges legacy financial planning and analytics tools

Cube Software, a New York-based startup that’s building a next-gen financial planning and analysis (FP&A) platform for modern finance teams, has raised $ 10 million in a series A round of funding to disrupt what it calls the “decades-old” enterprise performance management (EPM) industry.

Founded in 2018, Cube has entered a space occupied by numerous legacy players, including publicly-traded Anaplan; Adaptive Insights, which Workday acquired for north of $ 1.5 billion in 2018; Hyperion, which Oracle bought for more than $ 3 billion in 2007; and good old-fashioned spreadsheets.

Cube is looking to combine the power of a modern software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform with the familiar flexibility of spreadsheets.

“Within Finance, FP&A is a mission critical function that relies on spreadsheets alone in 80-90% of companies,” Cube founder and CEO Christina Ross told VentureBeat. “The problem is that spreadsheets are manual and error prone, while legacy FP&A software requires users to learn an entirely new ecosystem outside of spreadsheets to do the same job.”

Above: Cube’s FP&A platform

And so Cube is setting out to make FP&A software more accessible, with the ability to onboard users in days versus months, while connecting directly into existing spreadsheets and other data sources to deliver analytics and insights.

In other words, Cube wants to supplement, rather than replace, spreadsheets. “We believe that the spreadsheet is not your enemy,” Ross added.

Companies can connect Cube to multiple data sources — using Cube’s API or via pre-built integrations — to consolidate all their data automatically. They can also model how changes to key assumptions may impact their outputs, create customizable reports based on reusable templates, and integrate with any spreadsheet, including Excel and Google Sheets, with support for bi-directional data sharing.

So while Cube is a full-fledged EPM platform in its own right, replete with its own built-in spreadsheet-style tooling, it allows users to work in whatever environment they’re comfortable with, including Excel.

Above: Cube: Sharing data with Excel spreadsheet

There has been a hive of activity across the EPM and business forecasting sphere of late, with Jedox locking down $ 100 million in financing and French upstart Pigment securing $ 26 million. Prior to now, Cube had only raised a small $ 5 million seed round of funding, however it has amassed a fairly impressive roster of customers including Japanese ecommerce giant Mercari and freshly minted DevOps unicorn Harness.

With a fresh $ 10 million in the bank, the company said that it’s tripling the size of its product and engineering teams. “Much of this is to build out our platform for enterprise scale and continue to add integrations for our growing customer base,” Ross said.