Adaptive Planning gets $22M for cloud-based performance management

Adaptive Planning, a business performance management company, announced Wednesday that it has raised a cool $22 million in venture capital.

Unless you work in accounting or as a business manager, you probably won’t find Adaptive Planning’s services all that exciting. But for small businesses, services like Adaptive Planning can help track which decisions were a huge mistake and which ones really paid off.

Founded in 2003, the company started out offering software for companies to plan and report business performance to figure out if their decisions were paying off. When cloud computing became popular, Adaptive Planning created a software-as-a-service product with dashboards, analytics, and other visual data representations.

Cloud-based Adaptive Planning specializes in helping businesses that want to measure their company’s performance but may shy away from cloud technology. The company claims its services are so easy to use, it takes four hours to train an admin user and just 30 minutes to train the end-user, or the typical employee or non-tech savvy executive. The company is going after Excel’s business, trying to lure businesses away from using spreadsheets to report and analyze financial and performance data.

“The new funding will allow us to scale our direct sales and partner channels worldwide and to deliver a broad set of new performance management capabilities — across CPM, business intelligence, functional planning and reporting, and more,” said Adaptive Planning chief executive officer John Herr in a statement.

The company’s competitors include Oracle and SAP, which offer high-end solutions for tracking business performance. Host Analytics and Infor also compete in the space, offering corporate performance management services to smaller businesses.

Adaptive Planning is based in Mountain View, Calif. and has more than 50 employees. This latest round of funding comes from new investor Norwest Venture Partners, and previous investors Cardinal Venture Capital, Clairmont Capital, Monitor Ventures, and ONSET Ventures.

Hand in cloud photo: basketman23/Shutterstock