Vena Solutions Hit $100M ARR: How Co-Founder Don Mal Won a Crowded Planning Market by Embracing Excel

October 26, 2026

TL;DR: Vena Solutions is a Toronto software company that sells budgeting, planning and reporting software to finance teams, built on top of Microsoft Excel instead of replacing it. It was founded in 2011 by Don Mal, Rishi Grover and George Papayiannis. Vena announced in July 2024 that it had crossed $100M USD in annual recurring revenue, and BetaKit reported a $300M CAD Series C from Vista Equity Partners in 2021. As Mal shared on the show, the company reached $1M in ARR in about 18 months and won 75% or more of its competitive deals in a market with roughly a dozen rivals. The bet was simple: every competitor was trying to kill Excel, so Vena embraced it. Mal told the story on The Product Market Fit Show. The episode aired in September 2024.

A note on sourcing. Anything labeled "as he shared on the show" comes from the interview and has not been independently confirmed. Funding, ARR and acquisition figures labeled with a source and date were checked against press coverage and Vena's own announcements in October 2026.

What does Vena Solutions do?

Vena makes financial planning and analysis (FP&A) software for mid-market companies. Finance teams use it to build budgets, forecasts and reports. The difference is that the grid people type into is real Microsoft Excel, connected to a central database, workflow and security layer.

When Vena launched, that was a contrarian position. Mal described it on the show.

"All of the vendors were replacing Microsoft Excel as the tool that most companies use for budgeting and planning. We actually embraced Microsoft Excel as the grid technology in our software." — Don Mal, Vena

The pain Vena solved was the old budgeting process. A finance team would email spreadsheets to every department, chase people for numbers, and then stitch dozens of files into one master budget by hand. As Mal explained, nobody knew which version was the latest, who changed a number, or when. Vena kept the familiar Excel interface but added a single source of truth, version control and a status view of who had finished their part.

As of July 2024, BetaKit reported that Vena had more than 1,700 customers, citing the company's website.

Key stat: Vena announced it had passed $100M USD in ARR in July 2024 (Business Wire, July 2024), which put it in the group Bessemer Venture Partners calls "centaurs."

Who founded Vena Solutions?

Vena was founded in Toronto in 2011 by three people: Don Mal, Rishi Grover and George Papayiannis. As Mal shared on the show, the three met at a Starbucks and decided to build something together.

The idea came out of an acquisition. Mal and Grover worked at a company that IBM bought in 2010. That company had two products. As Mal told it, IBM wanted to run with one and shelved the other. Vena came to market a year later to fill the gap the shelved product left, but with its own Excel-native approach.

The founders split the work cleanly, and Mal credits that for much of the early speed.

"I was kind of a sales CEO. Rishi was a product leader as a founder, and George was the technical leader." — Don Mal, Vena

Mal had run sales at the acquired company. Grover had been a solutions engineer there, which made him, in Mal's words, "a great demo guy." Papayiannis built the technology. About a year in, as Mal shared on the show, Papayiannis rewrote the code as multi-tenant cloud software, which let Vena move from on-premise perpetual licenses to subscriptions.

Mal also said he left what he described as a seven-figure income to start Vena, and he did it before he had seen a product. He left Vena about five years before the interview, when the company was, in his words, halfway to $100M ARR. Hunter Madeley is named as CEO in Vena's 2024 through 2026 press releases.

How much has Vena Solutions raised?

The figures below mix what Mal said on the show with press-verified numbers. Totals for Vena vary a lot across databases, partly because some count in Canadian dollars and some in US dollars, so this section sticks to primary reporting.

Friends and family: just over $1M. As he shared on the show.
Angel round: about $3M. As he shared on the show, followed by smaller checks from about three institutional investors. He said they did four or five small rounds before the first big one.
First major round: close to $30M, about five years after founding. As he shared on the show, it came from the first "real serious investor" and Vena labeled it a Series A and Series B together.
Next round: $115M, shortly after Mal left. As he shared on the show.
Series C, 2021: $300M CAD from Vista Equity Partners, for a minority stake (BetaKit, April 2021). Amalgam Insights put it at more than $240M USD.

Key stat: BetaKit reported Vena's total funding at about $450M CAD after the 2021 Vista round. Mal's on-air estimate was "almost $300 million," which likely reflects a different currency or cutoff. No valuation for the Vista round was disclosed, so none is given here.

Since the interview, Vena has started buying companies. In February 2026, it announced the acquisition of Acterys, a planning platform built on Microsoft Power BI, which BetaKit reported had about $13M USD in ARR and more than 300 customers. Vena's newsroom says that deal has closed. On July 28, 2026, Vena announced an agreement to acquire Toronto startup Morpheo AI to add agentic AI to its planning software. Terms of both deals were not disclosed.

How did Vena get its first customers?

Mal's first move was not a product hire. It was a lead generation hire.

"If you don't have leads, you don't have sales. If you don't have sales, you don't have a company." — Don Mal, Vena

As he shared on the show, Vena hired a BDR named Josh, who had also worked at the company IBM acquired and had a track record of generating leads. Within a few weeks of launching in August 2011, Vena was in conversations with buyers. Mal said he has made the same first hire at his two startups since, and called it the number one hire.

The first customer was First Wind, an energy company in Massachusetts. Mal remembers the buyer asking how many customers Vena had. He answered that they would be "one of our first 20 customers." The buyer said that was good enough.

The big early logo was Wells Fargo. As Mal shared on the show, it was around Vena's 20th customer. The three founders flew down and faced a room of skeptical reviewers.

"We were there in our room with about 20 highly critical of us kind of folks that were vetting our software. And we were just confident." — Don Mal, Vena

They whiteboarded how the product worked, and Wells Fargo took the chance. As he shared on the show, that first deal was worth about $300K USD. Banks used Vena for CCAR, a regulatory liquidity reporting process they had been running in uncontrolled spreadsheets. Mal said Vena later sold to many large US banks at around $500K a year, while the core mid-market planning deal was closer to $30K per customer per year.

Key stat: as he shared on the show, Vena reached $1M in ARR in about a year and a half, slowed slightly by selling perpetual licenses in its first months.

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The MVP was narrow. Mal listed four parts.

"So on an MVP, you need to have the grid, database, workflow, and security. Once you have that, you're off and running." — Don Mal, Vena

For more on landing early logos, see getting your first enterprise customer.

How did Vena win in a crowded market?

When Vena entered, Mal said there were already about a dozen players. Almost every deal had two or three competitors. But they all shared one trait: they replaced Excel. That made Vena's pitch easy to say.

"We would win, our win rates against competitors was 75 % or higher." — Don Mal, Vena

He also chose the right segment for the message. The vendors that replaced Excel did best with large enterprises. Vena went after the mid-market, where Excel was everywhere and ease of use mattered most. Mal said he used to carry a Staples "easy button" in his bag to make the point in meetings.

Most deals were not competitive displacements. As he shared on the show, Vena mostly replaced plain Excel, a greenfield market of finance teams that had never bought a planning tool.

Mal sees a crowded market as a good sign, not a warning.

"Having competition, I think, is a good thing. It just validates that there's a market and a space that you can plan, but you've got to have a way to do it that's unique." — Don Mal, Vena

He noted the category keeps recycling. Of the first five competitors Vena faced, he said all had since been acquired, and about five new ones had entered, leaving roughly 15 vendors at any time.

On ROI, Mal said the pitch was not headcount savings. It was getting more value from expensive finance people who spent their days chasing spreadsheets, and giving the CFO numbers they could trust. In his words, it was about "being able to sleep at night."

Mal did name one costly miss. As he shared on the show, Vena spent over $1M launching an enterprise sales motion with expensive reps, using a playbook that looked too much like its mid-market one. It took a long time to figure that segment out.

What did Don Mal do after Vena?

Mal kept building. As he shared on the show, he went on to start Fluence, which Pablo noted on the show had grown to over $10M in ARR. Anaplan announced an agreement to acquire Fluence Technologies on April 26, 2024 (Anaplan press release). At the time of the interview he was executive chairman of a new startup called Una, which pulls CRM, customer success and finance data together to show SaaS companies where their revenue engine has friction. He described it as software he wished he had while growing Vena. At both companies he has hired a CEO and taken the chairman role, focusing on hiring, capital and go-to-market strategy.

Key lessons from Don's playbook

1. Stick close to your knitting. Mal's most repeated advice is to build where you already have knowledge and a network. Vena's founders had sold a similar product to the same buyers, which made the first customers, the Wells Fargo meeting and early hires much easier.

"So my first advice to founders, early entrepreneurs, is look, what do you know about the product and the space that you're entering?" — Don Mal, Vena

2. Hire for leads first. Mal's first hire at Vena, and at his next two companies, was a lead generation person. With the founders covering product, tech and closing, pipeline was the missing piece. 3. In a crowded market, be different on one obvious axis. Every rival replaced Excel. Vena kept it. One clear contrast made a 75%-plus win rate possible. 4. Keep the MVP to what the buyer cannot live without. Grid, database, workflow and security. Everything else came later. 5. Split founder roles cleanly. Sales, product and engineering each had one owner, and each founder let the others lead their lane.

Listen to the full interview: They hit $100M ARR in a crowded market. Here's how they got to $1M ARR in just 18 months.

FAQ: Vena Solutions

Q: What is Vena Solutions? A: Vena Solutions is a Toronto-based company that makes Excel-native budgeting, planning and reporting software for finance teams. It was founded in 2011 and announced in July 2024 that it had passed $100M USD in ARR.

Q: Who founded Vena Solutions? A: Vena was co-founded in 2011 by Don Mal, Rishi Grover and George Papayiannis. Mal described himself on the show as the early "sales CEO." He left about five years before the September 2024 interview.

Q: Who is the CEO of Vena Solutions? A: Hunter Madeley is named as Vena's CEO in the company's press releases from 2024 through 2026.

Q: How much funding has Vena Solutions raised? A: BetaKit reported total funding of about $450M CAD after a $300M CAD Series C from Vista Equity Partners in 2021. No valuation was disclosed.

Q: Who are Vena Solutions' customers? A: BetaKit reported more than 1,700 customers as of July 2024. As Mal shared on the show, early customers included First Wind, an energy company in Massachusetts, and Wells Fargo, which signed around Vena's 20th customer.

Sources: Listen to the Full Founder Story

Don Mal, Vena Solutions — a former sales leader who left a seven-figure job in 2011 to co-found an Excel-native planning company that reached $1M ARR in about 18 months and later crossed $100M USD in ARR.