Vena teams up with FP&A software peer Acterys in merger deal

Dive Brief:

Finance technology firm Vena is looking to expand through a merger with Acterys, an industry peer, amid a flurry of deal activity in the broader CFO software market.
Vena, headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, announced last week that it was planning to acquire Sydney, Australia-based Acterys for an undisclosed amount. Both companies focus on providing financial planning and analysis tools within the Microsoft ecosystem. But Vena has gaps that it wants to fill with the proposed tie-up, according to CEO Hunter Madeley.
“We have deep alignment with Microsoft around Excel and Azure Open AI, and less so around a few other key applications and technologies, including Power BI and Fabric,” he said in an interview.

Dive Insight:

Vena is one of many vendors competing in the increasingly crowded “office of the CFO software market,” which is expected to grow from $71 billion in 2023 to $131 billion in 2028, according to global investment bank Carlsquare.

OneStream, another major market player, announced last month that it agreed to be acquired by Hg, an investor in software and data businesses, for $6.4 billion.

In December, financial close and accounting automation firm Blackline said it acquired New York-based finance tech startup WiseLayer. The financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

Meanwhile, finance and HR software giant Workday said last November that it agreed to buy Pipedream, an integration platform for AI agents, also for an undisclosed amount.

In the 12 months ending in June 2025, there were over 150 merger-and-acquisition and financing deals in the CFO software market, according to an analysis by global tech investment bank Drake Star Partners.

High growth areas of the market include FP&A software, benefiting from “increasing demand for agile scenario planning and integrated performance management,” Drake Star analysts wrote in a report last year.

For its part, Vena is focused on becoming “the most widely adopted and highly valued planning platform within the Microsoft ecosystem,” Madeley told CFO Dive.

“I’d say it’s less an expression that we believe that Microsoft will win the office of finance writ large,” he said. “It is an expression that we believe the Microsoft market is very large and that Microsoft is making very interesting and smart investments when it comes to office productivity tools.”

Acterys stood out as an attractive acquisition target in part because it does “a unique job of amplifying how folks get leverage out of Power BI and Fabric,” Madeley said. He said Vena was also impressed with the financial profile of Acterys, which has achieved annual recurring revenue of roughly $13 million.

The deal is subject to approval by Australia's Foreign Investment Review Board, a Vena spokeswoman said.

Vena claims to be “the only complete FP&A platform powered by agentic AI and purpose-built to amplify the Microsoft technology ecosystem.” In April of last year, Vena reported that 89% of finance teams were still depending on Excel despite modern planning tools.

OneStream, which owns a broader suite of CFO tools, currently brands itself as the “only unified finance platform built entirely on the Microsoft technology stack.”

An October blog post from OneStream highlighted the challenges of relying on Excel, while also acknowledging its current importance in the office of the CFO, referring to spreadsheets as the “Swiss army knife of finance.”

OneStream announced in November that it entered into an alliance with Microsoft allowing the finance software maker to incorporate its own AI agents into the “most widely used” Microsoft products, including Excel and Microsoft 365 Copilot.

“We look forward to continuing to deepen our strategic partnership with Microsoft as we expand these capabilities and help more finance teams within the Microsoft ecosystem,” OneStream CEO Tom Shea said in an emailed statement.

Workday’s Adaptive Planning platform also supports Excel, although a blog post published by the company last year called for FP&A professionals to move beyond the decades-old Microsoft tool.

“Manual processes, version confusion, and siloed workflows prevent finance from making decisions on time and with confidence,” Bruno J. Navarro, a thought leader at Workday, said in the post. “The needs of the business have evolved, and FP&A must evolve with them.”