DataRails, a leading software solution for financial planning and analysis (FP&A), has announced a strengthening of its executive team.
Having completed a Series A round in June 2021, the startup, based in Tel Aviv and New York, has drawn an impressive $53.5 million in total funding from investors. Since then, the founders have recruited several key additions to their executive team, aiming to bolster their foundations as they look to continue their rapid growth. Their latest hire is David Rosenburg as the new VP customer success.
Rosenberg brings considerable experience in managing scale within the data industry. In his previous role, he was the managing director for the data consulting firm Keyrus and oversaw the growth of the company from 35 employees to 120 during his tenure. Rosenberg’s distinguished, 17-year career includes roles at vision.bi, Allscripts, and Intel. He was handpicked for his experience in both data analytics and customer-facing leadership.
Announcing the hire, DataRails Co-founder and CEO Didi Gurfinkel gave Rosenberg a warm welcome message. “Customer success has always been at the core of everything we do at DataRails,” he said in a statement, “and David will bring enormous experience and insight into delighting customers at every stage of their journey.”
The outgoing VP of customer success, Tal Goori, remains with DataRails in a new role as VP of strategy. The speed with which DataRails has grown has necessitated the creation of her role in order to allow further scaling for the young company. The announcement was a triple-header, as Sergey Spivakov also joined the executive team as VP of R&D, having been promoted from his previous role as DataRails’s R&D director.
These announcements follow fresh off of several major hires in October 2021, as DataRails builds its executive “dream team.” In that recruiting surge, Zviki Shimon joined as CFO, Yair Areli joined as senior VP global sales, Nir Mandel joined as VP product management and finally, Aviv Canaani joined as VP of marketing. The announcements today indicate that DataRails is committed to operating under a world-class leadership team.
DataRails was founded in 2015 by Didi Gurfinkel, Eyal Cohen, and Oded Har-Tal. The idea behind the company is simple and relatable for many organizations around the world that rely on Excel spreadsheets. The Microsoft program has many strengths and is the go-to solution for generating reports, but its weaknesses can cause significant friction for finance teams, especially when it comes to time lost through manual processes.
DataRails recently estimated dysfunctional financial reporting will cost US businesses $7.8 billion in 2022, primarily due to tedious, error-prone work that can be easily automated.
As a software product, DataRails aims to solve this common problem by allowing FP&A teams to consolidate and process data connected to third-party sources, while working in spreadsheets. Information is then stored in a database in the cloud, which allows for much more powerful modeling to be done and for more effective forecasting. Through integrations, users can be confident their models are using the most up-to-date information possible, and executives will always be looking at the best data available.
A major competitive advantage for DataRails is that finance teams continue to rely on Excel, so there is far less training needed than standalone platforms. This could be a major reason why they were able to take off during the pandemic, as companies rushed to digitize. Increased uncertainty, meanwhile, meant that financial planning became even more critical for many businesses, and DataRails was a natural choice for those who were already comfortable with Excel.
DataRails has announced that the company is on course to have 1300 customers by the end of 2022, and it will be interesting to see how they can build from here with their new executive team.