CPM provider Adaptive Insights raises $75M

The company will use the funding for product development and international expansion

Its fair to say that, nowadays, companies have more data and analytics than they've ever had before to get some kind of advantage over their competition. But they need a better way to parse it out, and Excel spreadsheets and on-premises CPM solutions are simply not adequate for the job,

Cloud corporate performance management (CPM) company Adaptive Insights is changing that, and now it has raised a $75 million funding round, it was announced on Tuesday.

The funding came from new investor JMI Equity, along with existing investors Norwest Venture Partners, ONSET Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Cardinal Venture Capital, Monitor Ventures, and Information Venture Partners.

This round brings the company's total funding to $176 million.

Founded in 2003, Adaptive Insight offers software for business to assist them with budgeting, forecasting, reporting, consolidation, dashboards, and business intelligence through it's Adaptive Suite, which includes Adaptive Planning, Adaptive Consolidation, and Adaptive Discovery.  Each product is an individual solution that stands on its own, or they can be used together with the rest of the Adaptive Suite.

"Excel models are far too manual and brittle to serve as a suitable platform for running mission-critical enterprise processes, while legacy on-premises solutions are too costly, complex, and IT-intensive to be a fit for anyone but the largest companies, and even in those companies, legacy solutions are not well adopted, and are not flexible enough to support today’s agile business requirements," Tom Bogan, the CEO of Adaptive Insights, explained to me.

The Adaptive Suite "offers the best of both worlds," meaning that it combines "the powerful features of enterprise software with the flexibility of Excel and the ease of use of modern web-based applications."

The company currently has 2,700 customers, which represent a broad variety of company sizes and industries, spanning more than 500 high-growth technology companies to enterprise heavyweights. Customers include Coca-Cola, Siemens, Southwest Gas, Nationwide and Re/Max. It is growing fast, with over 50% year-over-year growth in total annual recurring revenue bookings, which were driven by new midsize and enterprise customers and expanded deal sizes globally.

"They use Adaptive for financial planning, reporting and forecasting purposes because it is the only offering that can help them gain a 360-degree view of their business—something that is needed in order to help drive better, more strategic business decisions," Bogan said.

It also helps that the company drives a high return on investment for its customers. For example, Montclair State University achieved 211% ROI after implementing Adaptive and Gentiva achieved 751% ROI after switching from legacy systems to Adaptive. Additionally, Gentiva has saved almost $1 million annually by adopting Adaptive, validating why thousands of companies are switching from outdated legacy systems to the cloud.

"Adaptive bet early that cloud computing would reshape the corporate performance management landscape and with 2,700 active customers, with 3 times more customers than the rest of the cloud CPM competitors combined, the bet is paying off," he said.

The company says it will use the funding for product development and expansion, especially internationally, where it saw 75% year-over-year growth in the first quarter of this year. 

"We will scale even more into the enterprise market. Currently more than a quarter of our customers are large enterprises – AAA, Coca-Cola and Southwest Gas are examples. We will expand our footprint via our partner network and our local Adaptive teams in markets where we have a presence. Currently UK, Australia and Japan," Bogan told me.

"We will also strengthen our products and services, along with continued investment in new Adaptive cross-product packages focused on business needs. Adaptive Solutions is one such example, where the first announced solution, Adaptive Revenue, differentiates by being the only industry solution that brings together sales, finance, and service stakeholders on a unified cloud CPM and business intelligence (BI) platform for planning, reporting, and analysis of the entire revenue lifecycle."

Utimately, Bogan believes that in the next few years more and more companies will come to lean on analytics, and that Adaptive Insights will be the company they turn to for them.

"From day one Adaptive has been focused on empowering CFOs and finance teams in companies of all sizes to drive greater success through analytics-based financial and operational management.," he said.

"Over the next five to 10 years, as more and more companies look to compete on analytics, and as CFOs and finance teams look to continue to elevate their strategic contribution to their businesses, we will be the strategic technology partner dedicated to their success."