Growth for any startup is hard, really hard. It takes time to successfully scale a new business. Most startups don’t have the resources to wait that long for growth to happen, hence the need to fold up and move on to something else. Anaplan, a start that is on a mission to kill the spreadsheet is having incredible success. Companies use Anaplan’s cloud-based solutions to model their business, collaborate on decisions, align operations and manage their sales and finances from one place.
“It offers cloud software that’s as easy to use as a spreadsheet, yet does sophisticating financial planning and prediction modeling, with the click of a mouse. Plus, it does things Excel can’t do, like let groups work together.”–Business Insider
The company was founded about eight years ago. But it’s really been in the past year that it has started to flourish. It went from making about $10 million in all of 2012, to $10 million per quarter in 2013. And $10 million per month as of Jan. 2014, the company told Business Insider.
Anaplan is a hyper-growth company you may have never heard of. In the past year they have opened eleven global offices, have doubled in size, and there is no sign of them slowing down.
In May 2014 it secured over $100m of funding from investors to plough into research, product development and expansion of its sales operation.
“This is an alternative to using programmes like Excel for things they were not designed for. Excel is great for personal productivity but not for running large companies on.”–said Michael Gould, Anaplan’s founder and chief technology officer.
“It is a very open market for us. There are a number of products working in this space but they are 20-30 years old now so we have reached a stage where someone needs to come in and create a completely new platform. A lot of companies are using things like Excel for operations they weren’t designed for. They are doing things on spreadsheets which get the job done but they would be better with purpose-built software.” he further stated.
In an interview with Business Insider, this is what Frederic Laluyaux,the CEO had to say about the company’s recent amazing growth.
Business Insider: Why has Anaplan become so popular all of a sudden?
Frederic Laluyaux: This is a space that has been dominated by Oracle, SAP, and IBM and their technology is aging. … We’ve been able to add hundreds of key accounts in the last few months. … We patiently invested for more than five years in the development of our blazing fast core data engine which is really the “secret sauce” of Anaplan.
BI: Who is using Anaplan and what does it replace?
FL: We are now helping some of the largest companies (HP, Kimberly-Clark, McAfee, Diageo to name a few) … For example with McAfee, Anaplan replaced their use of Excel and Oracle Hyperion.
BI: How has expanding internationally helped you grow?
FL: We opened operations in the UK, France, Sweden, Netherlands, Austria, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia and Russia. We have also a few strategic partnerships with global organizations like Deloitte and Accenture and with technology partners like Salesforce.com (with more on the way).
I would estimate that 60% of our revenue is now coming from outside of the U.S. so we’re expanding and it’s driving increased deal size. … We had an outstanding Q1 of 2014, as Anaplan achieved over 6x year-over-year growth for contract value booked.