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Excel-Killer Startup Anaplan Just Raised $100 Million On A $1 Billion-Plus Valuation

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Anaplan Fred Laluyaux
Anaplan CEO Fred Laluyaux.  Anaplan

Things are going exceptionally well for Anaplan these days, the startup that's taking on Excel with a cloud app.

The company just closed a $100 million series D investment, led by venture capitalist DFJ Growth. That brings the total it has raised to $150 million.

The company is now valued at over $1 billion, a source close to the company tells us.

Human-resources cloud company Workday was one of the investors in the round, as was Salesforce.com, which had invested in an earlier round, too. That means that Anaplan is backed by two of the most respected cloud companies in the nation.

Workday is led by co-CEO Aneel Bhusri, who is also a high-powered venture capitalist at Greylock Ventures, where he had invested in one of Anaplan's major competitors, Tidemark. [Update: Workday PR contacted us and told us Bhusri is no longer a board member of Tidemark. We had been asking questions to sources about this, asking if it was considered a conflict of interest.]

Other investors in Workday's huge round include Brookside Capital, Coatue Management, Sands Capital Management, Granite Ventures, Meritech Capital Partners, and Shasta Ventures.

The big raise might not be too shocking to anyone who's been following this market.

As we previously reported, Anaplan went from generating about $10 million in all of 2012 to $10 million per quarter in 2013. And it hit $10 million per month as of January 2014, it told Business Insider.

The company is trying to get people who run their businesses with spreadsheets to make the leap to the cloud. It offers a sophisticated financial planning and modeling tool that's as easy to use as a spreadsheet, but also does things Excel can't do, like letting groups work together. It also offers a bunch of preset tools it calls modules, which help companies track sales, capital expenditures, profitability planning, and workforce.

For instance, with a few clicks of a button, you could see how adding more employees might affect sales and profitability of a certain business unit.

Founded about eight years ago, it really started to flourish after it hired Frederic Laluyaux as its CEO (he'd come from SAP).

Laluyaux said the Workday investment happened because both companies share a lot of customers. They were working to make their cloud products work better together when "Workday learned that we were doing our D round," he said.

Laluyaux is happy to have Workday aboard. "Aneel's support and strong positive views on Anaplan are a testament that Anaplan is really on the right path," he said.

Randy Glein, managing director at DFJ Growth, will join Anaplan’s board of directors.

"Anaplan is addressing a very large market opportunity," Glein told us. "The company has the wind at its back and is scaling rapidly, thinking big about the future."

Next up, Anaplan wants to entice third-party developers to create prepackaged modules for its app. It also wants to let them tap into its cloud to add graphs and modeling to their own apps, Glein told us.

Here's a video that shows the Anaplan app in action:

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Julie Bort was Business Insider's Editor at Large for the Tech team. She loves investigating stories and shedding light on the tech industry's most amazing people.Here's a small sample of some of Julie's work.Former Pinterest employees describe a traumatic workplace where managers humiliate employees until they cry, Black people feel alienated, and the toxic culture 'eats away at your soul'Sex, tequila, and a tiger: Employees inside Adam Neumann's WeWork talk about the nonstop party to attain a $100 billion dream and the messy reality that tanked itInsiders say WeWork's IT is a patchwork of cheap devices and Band-Aid fixes that will take millions to fixWeWork's toxic phone booths were created in-house by its Powered by We business70-hour weeks and 'WTF' emails: 42 employees reveal the frenzy of working at Tesla under the 'cult' of Elon MuskElon Musk works so many hours at Tesla, employees are constantly finding him asleep under tables and desksHow this woman went from a Pizza Hut employee to a founder of a $4 billion startupAn Oracle insider explains how some salespeople gamed the system to sell more cloudTHE TAKEDOWN OF TRAVIS KALANICK: The untold story of Uber's infighting, backstabbing, and multimillion-dollar exit packagesMicrosoft is in talks to buy GitHub, a startup at the center of the software world last valued at $2 billionThe alarming inside story of a failed Google acquisition, and an employee who was hospitalizedInside Facebook's plan to eat another $350 billion IT marketHow a registered sex offender wound up living in an Airbnb hosting unsuspecting guestsA controversial ex-banker is the person who really runs Twitter — and he's gambling the company's future on one risky betSecret passages and skipped meals: Oracle's CEO gave us a rare peek at what it really takes to run a $37 billion companyHP told some employees to choose between becoming contractors with no benefits or being fired without severance'I felt like we were being extorted': Customer says Oracle tried to strong-arm him into a cloud saleHow the queen of Silicon Valley is helping Google go after Amazon's most profitable businessAirbnb host: A guest is squatting in my condo and I can't get him to leaveLIES, BOOZE, AND BILLIONS: How one of the fastest-growing startups in Silicon Valley history raised $580 million then spiraled out of controlGitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart — and we have the full inside storyWhen she's not writing for Business Insider, Julie can usually be found on the trails, on my mountain bike, or on my skis, if you know where to look.