This morning Cube, a startup that builds FP&A software for the mid-market, announced that it has raised a $10 million Series A. The company previously raised a $5 million seed round that TC covered last August. Mayfield led its Series A, which saw participation from Operator Collective and Bonfire Ventures.
FP&A is probably not an acronym that you come across often. It spells out to financial planning and analysis, or the process by which companies outline their financial future. It’s pretty damn important. But like lots of the tech that CFOs and other financial types use, software in the FP&A space is often a mix of antiquated, expensive and slow.
Just ask the CFO you know best. Cube wants to build software for FP&A work that at once isn’t awful, and doesn’t require companies to stop using spreadsheets. The company’s software absorbs information from a company’s general ledger (accounting software), CRM (Zoho CRM, perhaps) and payroll service into one location. From there, CFOs and their team can view the past and sketch their financial future using a few different viewing methods, including the venerable spreadsheet.
When TC last checked in on Cube, we said that we’d report back when the company had growth numbers to share. Happily the startup’s CEO Christina Ross was willing to share. Per the founder, Cube customers have scaled 4x since its seed round, and revenue growth is tracking ahead of customer growth. Even better, Cube’s contract mix has shifted, with the company now securing more than half of its deals with multi-year terms.
When we spoke to Ross, her newest investor, Mayfield’s Rajeev Batra, was also on the call. He added that Cube has seen deal win rates in the 60% to 70% range, implying that it has found product-market fit. As Cube’s software starts at $850 per month for its service, any deal win is material annual recurring revenue (ARR) for the early-stage startup. Batra also stressed that Cube is seeing strong engagement inside of its product.
What is Cube going to do with its new capital? Ross said that she’s a trained CFO and knows the worries of raising too much money. She knows where the money is going, she added. One place the company intends to spend is headcount. The startup plans to triple its personnel base by the end of 2021, hiring for both product and go-to-market (GTM) roles. Ross also noted her company had built out its sales function after its seed round, and intends to grow its marketing efforts now that it has secured new capital.
Cube fits neatly into a trend that we’re seeing in recent months of companies not merely raising successive funding rounds more rapidly than the old-fashioned 18-month cadence. It’s somewhat common lately to see some startups raising new rounds just a few quarters after their last capital event. M1 Finance also announced a new round this morning, for example; it raised twice in 2020.
Let’s see what Cube can do with its Series A. If it can keep its recent pace of growth up, perhaps it will raise again this year.
