Why We Invested in Datarails - Modernising Finance Without Breaking Excel

Vertex Growth invests in DataRails

We are pleased to share a recent investment by Vertex Growth in DataRails, a company building a new operating layer for finance teams, one that modernises how financial planning, analysis, and reporting are done, without forcing organisations to abandon the tools they already rely on.

The problem we kept seeing

Across markets and industries, finance teams are under growing pressure. Corporate finance has become meaningfully more complex: multi-country operations, tighter regulatory requirements, shorter reporting cycles, and higher expectations from boards and management for real-time insight.

Yet despite this complexity, Excel remains the backbone of finance operations in most organisations. More than 70% of companies still rely heavily on spreadsheets for budgeting, forecasting, and reporting. Excel is flexible, powerful, and deeply embedded in day-to-day workflows, but it was never designed to function as an enterprise-grade finance system.

As a standalone tool, Excel lacks robust workflow controls, auditability, version management, and native integration across modern data sources. The result is a familiar but costly pattern: finance teams spending weeks each quarter stitching together data, reconciling versions, building charts, and formatting slides, time that should be spent on analysis, insight, and decision-making.

Many FP&A software solutions attempt to solve this problem by pulling users out of Excel entirely. In practice, this often leads to long implementation cycles, significant change-management friction, and limited adoption, particularly among SMEs and mid-market companies, where finance teams are lean and operational demands are high.

What DataRails does differently

DataRails takes a fundamentally different approach. Rather than replacing Excel, it upgrades it.

The platform is designed to be Excel-native. Finance teams continue working within familiar spreadsheets, while DataRails automates data ingestion, consolidation, mapping, and reporting behind the scenes. Complex financial preparation and analysis that once took entire teams two to three weeks per quarter can now be completed in minutes.

At a practical level, CFOs can query the platform with questions such as: “What were the key profitability drivers last quarter, and how did they change year-on-year?” and receive board-ready PowerPoint slides instantly. The system connects directly to existing ERPs, accounting systems, CRMs, and other data sources, understands business context, and generates presentation-ready outputs without manual Excel manipulation or slide formatting.

This combination of automation, intelligence, and familiarity materially lowers adoption resistance while delivering immediate productivity gains for finance teams.

Why this stood out to us as investors

Several factors reinforced our conviction in DataRails:

Clear product differentiation

DataRails’ patented data-mapping and logical cell-tracking technology allows the platform to understand and structure unstructured financial data, even as spreadsheets evolve over time. This creates a strong foundation for automation and AI-driven insight that competitors relying on standard Excel or BI layers struggle to replicate.

Strong product-market fit

The company has scaled to more than 400 enterprise customers with over 70% year-on-year revenue growth. Adoption is particularly strong in traditional industries such as transportation, construction, mining, and hospitality, sectors where finance complexity is high, but appetite for wholesale system replacement is low.

A compelling expansion path

What began as an FP&A solution is evolving into a broader finance operations platform, with modules spanning cash management, month-end close, and AI-assisted financial analysis. This positions DataRails to become a daily system of record for CFOs and finance teams, particularly in the SME and mid-market segment.

Experienced founders and disciplined execution

Founders Didi, Eyal, and Obed bring deep enterprise software experience. The company’s transition to a pure SaaS model has driven accelerating ARR growth and longer-duration customer contracts, an important signal of durability and long-term customer value.

Why now

The global FP&A software market continues to expand rapidly, driven by the same forces finance teams are grappling with today: increasing complexity, regulatory pressure, and the need for faster, more accurate insight.

Yet the vast majority of this market still operates on manual, Excel-based workflows. We believe this represents a meaningful opportunity for a platform that can modernise finance operations without breaking existing workflows.

DataRails sits squarely at that intersection.

Our conviction

We invested in DataRails because it addresses a large, persistent problem with a pragmatic and defensible solution. By meeting finance teams where they are, and quietly transforming how work gets done, the company has built strong momentum, a differentiated product, and a clear path to becoming a category-defining finance operations platform.

We look forward to supporting the DataRails team as they continue to scale globally and deepen their impact across finance organisations.

Nikodemus Jaya is an Executive Director, Investment at Vertex Growth, where he focuses on investing in fintech, insuretech, e-commerce, media, logistics, agritech, cybersecurity, and IoT.