Growblocks Raises $6M to Help Businesses Forecast Revenues

Danish software firm Growblocks has raised $6.4 million to expand its revenue planning platform.

“By helping revenue operators manage their revenue engine, our revenue planning and execution platform (FP & E) is designed to help companies grow efficiently and predictably, even in our current economic climate,” Co-founder and CEO Toni Holhbein wrote in a company blog entry Wednesday (Feb. 8) announcing the seed funding.

In that post, Holhbein explains the philosophy behind the company, and the hurdles revenue professionals face, arguing that business intelligence and financial planning tools don’t go far enough in projecting revenue.

The other option for revenue operations professionals (RevOps), he said, is Microsoft Excel, although in Holhbein’s view, that’s no solution at all.

“In RevOps-circles, Excel is seen as the anti-tool,” wrote Holhbein. “Or the wild-wild-west. No rules, no structure, and everything is possible. For RevOps, Excel is only a marginal step up from a pen and paper.”

Growblocks isn’t alone in its opinion. As PYMNTS reported last fall, recent findings show Excel is proving to be prone to often costly errors.

Excel spreadsheet products can be found across industries and still widely relied upon by countless businesses and organizations that deal with the application, or manual entry, of data.

“Safe to say Excel is a behemoth in the spreadsheet world,” PYMNTS wrote in November. “Yet the tool is also rife with the potential for creating common, human error-driven problems that range from inconvenience to financial loss and reputation damage, all the way to bankruptcy and legal penalties.”

During the COVID pandemic, a lack of basic data controls caused 16,000 COVID-19 test results in the U.K. to be lost. Researchers have had to rename 27 human genes to prevent Excel from misreading their symbols as dates, a longtime frustration with the spreadsheet software. Meanwhile, there are stories-upon-stories of companies and organizations suffering sizable financial losses thanks to completely avoidable human error.

Growblock’s funding follows a period in which European startups struggled to find financing, as PYMNTS noted last year.

A report in December by the London-based venture capital (VC) firm Atomico found that Europe’s tech sector saw at least $400 billion in value wiped out in 2022.

The report also noted that 82% of founders interviewed said it was more difficult to raise venture capital in 2022 than in 2021.