£62.6m in funding for Anaplan

SOFTWARE business Anaplan has announced a funding round of £62.6m to grow capacity as demand for its cloud-based business platform skyrockets.

Indian firm Premji Invest led the funding round, supported by Baillie Gifford, Founders Circle Capital and Harmony Partners, in addition to their regular investors.

The Silicon Valley business, which has its main research and development facilities in York, has also announced the appointment of chief financial officer James Budge, bringing more than 20 years of leadership to the business.

Chief executive Fred Laluyaux said: “Every day we meet executives across the world expressing urgency to become numbers driven in the strategic and tactical decisions they make.

“But they are stuck using technologies that were designed 30 or more years ago in another era where today’s business challenges didn’t exist.”

Founder Michael Gould launched the business seven years ago in a North Yorkshire farmhouse, before moving operations to San Francisco – but keeping operations in York.

Sandesh Patnam, partner and lead U.S. Investor, at Premji Invest said: “Premji Invest is thrilled to lead this investment round because we have seen a broad range of companies around the world transform their businesses with Anaplan’s agile planning and modeling platform,” said

“Anaplan is a game changer because it enables companies to not only make processes faster and easier, but also fundamentally change the way their people work and make decisions.”

Anaplan President and chief executive Fred Laluyaux said, “We are thrilled to welcome our new investors and James to the company. With James’ tremendous track record we now have an outstanding finance executive on our team to guide our continued growth,” said Laluyaux.

Allen & Company LLC served as financial adviser to Anaplan on this latest round of financing.