Anaplan

Founded in 2006 by Michael Gould in York, England, around an in-house calculation engine (Hyperblock) that lets large organisations model budgets, sales forecasts and workforce planning without the colossal spreadsheets that otherwise govern such things. The category is called EPM — enterprise performance management — and the point is that many departments can plan against the same data model at once.

Anaplan went public in 2018 and was bought in 2022 by Thoma Bravo for about $10.7 billion — the same owner that took Coupa private the following year. Competition comes from Oracle, SAP and Workday's Adaptive Planning. The problem it solves is old and dull but universal: nobody really trusts the budget spreadsheet, yet everybody depends on it.