Datarails raised $70 million in a Series C round led by One Peak, with participation from Vertex Growth, Vintage Investment Partners, Zeev Ventures, Innovation Endeavors, Qumra Capital, and Claltech — bringing total funding to $175 million. The company reported 70% year-over-year revenue growth in 2025 and nearly doubled its workforce to over 400 employees.

Alongside the raise, Datarails launched three AI Finance Agents — Strategy, Planning, and Reporting — allowing finance teams to instantly generate board-ready PowerPoint, PDF, and Excel outputs from unified ERP, CRM, HRIS, and spreadsheet data. The FinanceOS platform now spans FP&A, Month-End Close, Cash Management, and Spend Control.

AI-first finance platform Aleph raised $29 million to further develop its AI-powered finance software, with a focus on forecasting, variance detection, and performance monitoring. The investment supports product expansion and deeper AI-driven capabilities designed to help finance leaders reduce reliance on manual analysis. Aleph’s dual-spreadsheet approach (Excel + Google Sheets) and broad connector coverage position it as a flexible alternative for system-agnostic finance teams.

Una Software closed its seed round led by Staircase Ventures, bringing total funding to $13 million. Simultaneous with the close, the company appointed Michael Morrison — former CEO of Fluence Technologies (acquired by Anaplan, 2024) and Jirav — as CEO. Una is an AI-native FP&A platform targeting midmarket and enterprise finance teams, with recognition in the Nucleus Research 2026 CPM Value Matrix and BPM Partners’ Best New Vendor award for 2025.

Funding will be used to deepen Una’s AI agent framework, expand its global finance template library, and scale go-to-market. A company worth watching as it gains experienced leadership and institutional backing.

The defining M&A move of Q1: OneStream announced a definitive agreement to be acquired by Hg, a London-based software and data investor, in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $6.4 billion — $24.00 per share, a 31% premium to the January 5 close. General Atlantic and Tidemark join as minority investors. Tom Shea remains CEO; the current leadership team stays in place.

The deal returns OneStream to private ownership less than two years after its Nasdaq IPO under KKR. CEO Shea was direct about the rationale: the next 24–36 months will define winners and losers in AI for finance, and private ownership restores the velocity needed to invest ahead of the market. Hg brings an AI team of 100+ specialists and Hg Catalyst, a dedicated AI incubator.

Vena announced and closed its acquisition of Acterys (Managility Pty Ltd), the leading Power BI-based operational planning platform based in Sydney, Australia. The combination creates what Vena calls “Orchestrated Planning” — bringing together Vena’s Excel-native FP&A with Acterys’ Power BI write-back engine and Microsoft Fabric analytics in a single Microsoft-native environment.

Acterys had ~$13M ARR, growing 100% year-over-year, and served 300+ customers. Vena is on pace to approach $200M ARR with 3,000+ clients by end of 2026. BPM Partners named this acquisition a “vote of confidence” that the Power BI write-back approach has real merit — a category that also includes Lumel, deFacto Global, Aimplan, and Power ON.

OneStream executed a significant leadership restructuring to enter 2026 with an AI-first go-to-market posture:

Scott Leshinski → President. The former EVP of AI & Operational Analytics takes over global sales, marketing, revenue operations, and customer success. The promotion follows 60% year-over-year AI bookings growth in the first nine months of 2025.

John Kinzer → Interim CFO. The former CFO of HubSpot and Blackboard, and a longtime board member, stepped in as Interim CFO following the departure of Bill Koefoed (Dec 31, 2025). A permanent search is underway.

Pam McIntyre → Chief Accounting Officer. A newly created role. McIntyre has served as corporate controller since 2020 and oversees regulatory accounting, tax, treasury, and financial reporting.

Mike Zack, Acterys CEO, becomes General Manager of the Acterys division at Vena, focused on scaling enterprise operational planning within the combined Microsoft-native platform. Hesam Ziaei, Acterys CTO, joins Vena as VP, R&D, leading the unified agentic AI product roadmap across both platforms.

The integration begins immediately, with plans to connect the two platforms at the data and process level — enabling customers to deploy Orchestrated Planning across Finance, IT, and business stakeholders from a single governed environment.

Una Software appointed Michael Morrison as CEO alongside closing $13M in total seed funding. Morrison is one of the most recognized serial operators in the Office of the CFO software market — he previously served as CEO of Fluence Technologies, leading its acquisition by Anaplan in 2024, and as CEO of Jirav. Earlier in his career he held senior roles at Cognos, Applix, IBM, and led Datawatch Corporation through its acquisition by Altair Engineering in 2018.

Co-founder Clayton Ramnarine moves to Chief Revenue Officer, focusing on global go-to-market. Una is an AI-native FP&A platform recognized in the Nucleus Research 2026 CPM Value Matrix and named BPM Partners’ Best New Vendor for 2025. Worth tracking: Morrison has a specific pattern of taking emerging consolidation/planning vendors and creating exit events. Una is early-stage, but the pedigree in the room is not.

The most strategically significant product announcement of Q1 for the EPM competitive landscape: Lumel and Microsoft announced a first-party strategic alliance to bring enterprise planning natively into Microsoft Fabric as “Planning in Fabric IQ,” now available in public preview.

This is a first-party Microsoft product — co-engineered with Lumel — not a standard ISV integration. Key architectural differentiators: plans and actuals live in OneLake alongside ERP, CRM, and operational data (zero-copy); pricing is based on Fabric Capacity Units, not per-seat licenses; native connectivity to SAP, Oracle, Snowflake, Databricks, and Google BigQuery via OneLake Shortcuts.

For BPC and Hyperion customers evaluating replacements: this is a materially different value proposition than anything previously available in the Microsoft ecosystem. Organizations already paying for Fabric capacity can access EPM planning without incremental platform licensing.

insightsoftware announced the availability of its JustPerform EPM platform in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland — the first major European expansion since acquiring the Singapore-based vendor in January 2025. JustPerform is a fully cloud-native planning, consolidation, and reporting platform that BPM Partners named “Best New Vendor of the Year” in 2022.

The DACH launch takes a phased approach: planning and AI-driven forecasting first (Q1 2026), expanding to close and consolidation capabilities mid-2026, with full AI-integrated EPM across all modules by end of year. The platform integrates natively with IDL Konsis, insightsoftware’s long-established DACH consolidation solution.

SAP BPC for Microsoft (v10.1) reaches end of mainstream maintenance on June 30, 2026 — the most immediate deadline in the entire BPC customer base. SAP BPC for NetWeaver follows on December 31, 2027. No new features, patches, or SLAs after these dates. SAP’s official migration path points to SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) and Group Reporting, though the broader competitive field is actively recruiting BPC migrations.

The opportunity for SI partners is historic: every enterprise still running BPC for Microsoft must decide and act within months. The cost of staying is now higher than the cost of migrating.

One practical note for your conversations: For prospects who need more runway — whether to implement your solution properly or to explore AI use cases before committing — Column5’s BPC Lifeline program provides extended support past official SAP end dates. Customers know that BPC is not a long-term strategy, but it can take meaningful pressure off a prospect’s timeline when that matters. Worth knowing it exists.

The OneStream take-private announcement dominated EPM LinkedIn for the first three weeks of January. The reaction split sharply along lines of perspective: implementation partners largely viewed private ownership as a positive — faster AI investment, less quarterly earnings pressure, greater product velocity. Customer-side practitioners expressed concern about the accountability loss that comes with delisting, with specific worry about future pricing flexibility and long-term support commitments.

The most-engaged thread asked a simple question: “Is going private at $6.4B a sign of confidence in the AI opportunity, or a PE exit from the public markets?” Comments ran into the hundreds.

The Lumel-Microsoft Planning in Fabric IQ launch (March 18) generated the most substantive EPM industry debate of Q1. The central question: is Microsoft building EPM natively into its platform, and does that make best-of-breed vendors less relevant over time? Practitioners pointed to the consumption-based pricing model as a structural threat to seat-license EPM economics. Vendor advocates pushed back, arguing depth of financial logic, workflow governance, and audit trails remain far beyond what Fabric IQ delivers today.

A secondary thread: Vena’s Acterys acquisition is now read through the same lens — Vena specifically positioned Orchestrated Planning as the response to exactly this question, placing Finance and IT on a shared Microsoft-native platform before the Fabric IQ announcement arrived.

Gartner evaluated 14 vendors in its 2026 Financial Close and Consolidation Magic Quadrant — the most-watched analyst report in the EPM close and consolidation space. Key placements:

Leaders: OneStream (furthest in Completeness of Vision, 4th consecutive), Oracle (highest Ability to Execute), Wolters Kluwer / CCH Tagetik (3rd consecutive Leader).
Challenger: Anaplan — its first-ever appearance in this quadrant, having entered through the Fluence acquisition in 2024.
Niche Player: Vena.

BPM Partners published its 2026 Planning Buyers Guide — the most authoritative independent buyers guide in the EPM space, and the one your customers are actively reading. New for 2026: deeper vendor overviews, AI in CPM requirements and adoption status, and specific vendor AI offering breakdowns. Covers 22 vendors including Anaplan, Board, Jedox, Lumel, OneStream, Oracle, Pigment, Planful, Prophix, SAP, Unit4, Vena, Workday Adaptive Planning, and Wolters Kluwer CCH Tagetik.

Also published Q1: BPM Partners’ analysis of the Vena/Acterys deal — one of the most-read practitioner-grade M&A breakdowns in the EPM market this quarter.