There's a running joke in enterprise software circles: Excel will outlive us all. Datarails, a New York startup that's spent the better part of a decade trying to modernize financial planning without prying spreadsheets from the cold, dead hands of CFOs, just raised $70 million to prove the punch line might actually be a business strategy.
The Series C round, announced January 21 and led by growth equity firm One Peak, brings the company's total funding to $175 million. Israeli media estimates peg Datarails' valuation at roughly $550 million—a notable milestone for a platform that's essentially built its entire existence around the premise that finance teams won't abandon Excel, so you'd better build on top of it.
"We're not trying to replace the tool," CEO Didi Gurfinkel has said repeatedly, though this time the message comes with harder numbers: 70% year-over-year revenue growth in 2025 and a headcount that's swelled past 400 employees. Not bad for a company that, just over three years ago, was forced to cut 18% of its workforce during the tech sector's darker days in December 2022.
The Money Trail
One Peak led the round with a roster of returning investors that reads like a who's who of Israeli and American venture capital: Vertex Growth, Vintage Investment Partners, Zeev Ventures, Innovation Endeavors, Joey Low, Qumra Capital, and Claltech all participated. The Series C follows a $50 million B round in March 2022, itself preceded by a rapid-fire Series A—$18.5 million in April 2021, then a $25 million extension just two months later. That kind of compressed fundraising timeline now feels like a relic from a different era entirely.
Founded in 2015 by Gurfinkel alongside COO/Chief Product Officer Eyal Cohen and CTO Oded Har-Tal, Datarails has spent nearly a decade navigating the peculiar psychology of finance departments. These are teams where "upgrade" is often a four-letter word, and where the median age of the go-to tool—Microsoft Excel, first released in 1985—is pushing 40.
What They're Building (Besides Spreadsheet Infrastructure)
The new capital will fund the usual suspects: geographic expansion across North America and EMEA, increased R&D spending, and what the company coyly refers to as "potential M&A activity." More immediately, Datarails unveiled a suite of AI Finance Agents designed to handle strategy, planning, and reporting tasks that typically consume hours of a CFO's week.
The company calls its approach "FinanceOS," a bit of branding that positions Excel as the familiar front door while Datarails builds what it describes as a "governed single source of truth" in the backend. Recent additions include Month-End Close workflows launched in February 2026—a particularly tedious ritual in corporate finance—and an "Insights" feature that proactively flags business anomalies before someone notices the numbers look off.
Both lean heavily on the AI layer Datarails began constructing with its FP&A Genius tool back in July 2023, when generative AI was still a novelty rather than a checkbox feature. Whether these tools actually save time or just create new categories of work remains, as always, an open question.
The Competitive Calculus
Datarails operates in a crowded field where everyone's chasing the same prize: automating financial planning without triggering rebellion from the finance department. Rivals include Pigment, which raised a $145 million Series D in April 2024, and Vena Solutions, which secured $300 million back in May 2021. Then there's Anaplan, the 800-pound gorilla that Thoma Bravo took private in a $10.4 billion deal in 2022.
Each company has its own theory about what finance teams actually want. Datarails' bet—that Excel will remain the interface of choice—appears backed by at least one striking data point: market research suggesting 82% of finance professionals report something approaching emotional attachment to spreadsheet software. Perhaps more tellingly, the company's 70% revenue growth suggests customers are voting with their budgets.
Still, growth is one thing; profitability is another. The company hasn't disclosed whether it's operating in the black, and at 400+ employees supporting what is presumably thousands of customers, the path to sustainable margins may require more than just Excel nostalgia.
For now, Datarails is placing its chips on a simple wager: that in the eternal battle between new tools and old habits, old habits die hardest of all. And sometimes, maybe that's not such a bad thing to build a business around.
