Israeli spreadsheet management startup DataRails announced today that it has raised a $6 million in series A financing round led by Vertex Ventures, with the participation of existing investors Cyrus Angel Fund, Oryzn Capital and Joey Low. This latest financing brings DataRails total funding to date to $7 million. DataRails will use the money to open offices in New York, strengthen product development and build its worldwide customer portfolio.
Founded in 2015 by CEO Didi Gurfinkel, CPO Eyal Cohen and CTO Oded Har-Tal in 2015, DataRails, with 20 employees, is a graduate of the Microsoft Accelerator in Tel Aviv.
DataRails upgrades Excel into a smart spreadsheet management and organizational tool and thus solves a common problem facing organizations worldwide: the cumbersome nature of working with Excel spreadsheets. Despite a thriving market for enterprise software in recent years, many companies still rely on Excel, not only as an electronic spreadsheet, but also as a complex system for managing business-critical processes across the organization - particularly in the areas of finance, human resources and inventory. Employees and managers create Excel spreadsheets, share them with one another, copy and paste tables manually from one version to another, implement changes and resend updated sheets. The process then repeats itself, making it very difficult to consolidate information from different Excel files and track versions, resulting in inefficiency and error-prone work.
DataRails’ solution is based on a first-of-its-kind algorithm, capable of extracting and analyzing complex and unstructured data (including formulas) found in Excel files, and converting the data into structured information that can be entered into a database in the cloud. This also allows the DataRails system to be easily integrated with other enterprise systems.
With DataRails’ solution, users continue working in Excel, which they’re already deeply familiar with, but are given new capabilities that bridge the gap between regular Excel use and top-class business application standards in the areas of security, workflow, corporate governance and business intelligence. Users can consolidate data from different Excel files, visually view changes and logical updates over time and compare Excel documents. The system also helps prevent errors. For example, if a user works on an Excel file containing data that is not up-to-date, the system issues an alert. At the same time, data gathered from countless Excel documents throughout the organization is channeled into an interactive interface that presents the data as graphs that are updated in real time.
Vertex general partner Yanai Oron said, “We encounter many companies that attempt to replace Excel with dedicated systems in various verticals, with very few of them actually succeeding, mainly because they encounter steep friction in converting users to their new platforms. When we spoke to DataRails customers, including several leading Fortune 500 companies, they were thrilled to be able to continue using a tool they are so accustomed to, with the added capabilities that DataRails has to offer them. The benefits of using DataRails can clearly be seen in the rapid customer acquisition the company is experiencing and the overall excitement for the product among users.”
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on July 19, 2017
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