OneStream raises $200M to bring intelligent financial planning to the enterprise

OneStream, a corporate performance management (CPM) company that unifies customers’ financial planning processes and reporting through a single platform, has raised $200 million in a series B round of funding at a whopping $6 billion valuation.

CPM encapsulates all of the processes, systems, and methodologies an enterprise might use to track its business performance and usually involves gleaning data from myriad sources, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and human capital management (HCM).

Financial brain

Let’s say a business that collects global sales transaction data through its ERP tool wants to transform that information into something more meaningful and useful on a day-to-day basis, rather than waiting for monthly or quarterly reviews. OneStream essentially uses the data to generate “performance signals” that are delivered each day to help execs make “mid-stream” decisions.

“You can think of OneStream as the ‘financial brain’ for modern business,” CFO Bill Koefoed told VentureBeat. “OneStream helps organizations turn the data they are collecting into actionable, financially intelligent information. This is critical because traditionally it might take 30 days or more to pull insights from financial reporting. Companies have realized — especially in the midst of COVID-19 — that they need to access critical data insights on company performance much faster than that. We make that intelligence available daily, and that’s game-changing.”

OneStream typically integrates data from general ledger/ERP systems for financial data, though it also links to systems spanning HCM, CRM, and data warehouses, among other sources.

Above: OneStream: Sales analysis example

The story so far

Founded out of Rochester, Michigan in 2010, OneStream occupies a space that includes legacy players such as Oracle Hyperion, SAP, and IBM, as well as products focused on more specific business problems, such as those from Anaplan and Blackline. OneStream said it notched up 85% growth in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in 2020 and increased its customer base — which includes UPS, CapitalOne, and Costco — by 40% to more than 650 enterprises globally. It added that the majority of these customers were replacing legacy CPM applications.

“OneStream is replacing multiple cumbersome and antiquated legacy systems with a single, unified platform to help organizations better and more efficiently support their financial operations, such as financial close, consolidation, planning, reporting, and analysis,” Koefoed said, adding that CPM constitutes “just a small part” of its competitors’ businesses, while newer cloud-based solutions only address a subset of CPM requirements. “OneStream goes beyond this, addressing all aspects of corporate finance, local finance, and diverse operational business units in a single application — streamlining financial processes and planning while also maintaining compliance and regulatory reporting.”

OneStream had bootstrapped its way to profitability ahead of a $500 million-plus investment from KKR in 2019 that valued the company at more than $1 billion. A new $6 billion valuation puts OneStream alongside Anaplan and Blackline, which currently hold similar valuations on the public markets. Indeed, with a fresh $200 million in the bank from backers such as D1 Capital Partners, Tiger Global, and Investment Group of Santa Barbara (IGSB), Koefoed confirmed that OneStream is now contemplating the transition from being a private to a public company, though he stopped short of specifying a time frame.

By VentureBeat Source Link