Over the past two years, the three tools that best served startup financial modeling have all been acquired and absorbed into larger companies. Finmark was acquired by BILL and is sunsetting in April 2026. Causal was acquired by Lucanet in October 2024. Pry was acquired by Brex for $90M. Each of these products was built specifically for startups. None of them exist independently anymore.

This isn’t a coincidence. It’s a pattern worth understanding, because it left a real gap that affects real founders.

What’s left

If you need a financial model for your startup today, here are your options.

Spreadsheets. Free, flexible, and fragile. You can model anything, but you maintain everything yourself. No validation, no collaboration safety, no built-in financial logic. A wrong cell reference can silently throw off your entire projection, and you won’t know until someone asks a question you can’t answer.

Enterprise FP&A tools. Anaplan, Adaptive Planning, Vena, Datarails. These are built for companies with finance teams of 5-50 people. Pricing ranges from $10,000 to $165,000 per year. They assume you have a controller, an FP&A analyst, and an accounting system already in place. If you’re a 12-person startup, these tools aren’t designed for you and aren’t priced for you.

Runway Financial. The closest remaining option for startups, at $1,000-2,000 per month. But it doesn’t support cap table modeling or funding round mechanics. If you need to model how a Series A affects ownership, dilution, and option pool expansion, you’ll need a separate tool for that.

Cap table tools. Carta, Pulley, AngelList. These handle equity management well, but they don’t do financial projections. You can see who owns what percentage of the company, but you can’t model what happens to your burn rate if you hire six engineers next quarter.

Notice the gap. In the $50-500/month range, there is almost nothing built specifically for startup financial modeling. The space between “free spreadsheet” and “$1,000/month enterprise-lite” is nearly empty.

Why the gap exists

Building a financial modeling tool for startups requires two things that are genuinely hard to combine.

The first is financial depth. Startups have specific financial mechanics that general-purpose tools don’t handle well. SAFEs (Simple Agreements for Future Equity) convert into ownership at different caps. Option pools dilute existing shareholders in specific ways. Priced equity rounds involve pre-money valuations, pro rata rights, and liquidation preferences. Getting this math right isn’t optional – founders use these numbers in board meetings and investor negotiations.

The second is accessibility. Most startup founders aren’t finance people. A first-time founder raising a seed round may not know the difference between a convertible note and a SAFE, or why the distinction matters for their cap table. A financial model that requires you to already understand all of this defeats the purpose.

The acquired tools solved this problem to varying degrees. Finmark was particularly good at making financial modeling approachable. Causal had an interesting approach to scenario modeling. Pry was solid on the fundamentals. But building a sustainable business serving startups at $50-200/month, while maintaining financial depth and accessible UX, turned out to be hard enough that acquisition was the exit.

Why this matters

A financial model isn’t a document you produce for investors. It’s a thinking tool. It’s how you answer questions like: can we afford this hire? What happens to runway if revenue growth slows from 15% to 8%? If we raise $3M instead of $5M, how does that change our timeline to profitability?

Founders who don’t have a workable financial model don’t stop making these decisions. They just make them with less information. They guess at runway. They eyeball burn rate. They go into board meetings with numbers they’re not confident in.

Spreadsheets sort of work, until they don’t. Enterprise tools are overkill. And the startup-specific tools that threaded the needle are gone.

What filling the gap actually requires

It’s not enough to build a prettier spreadsheet. The tool has to encode the financial relationships that startups actually have: team costs tied to hiring plans, revenue tied to growth assumptions, funding rounds tied to cap table math.

It has to support multiple entry modes for people at different finance levels. Some founders think in dilution percentages. Some think in pre-money valuations. Some think in price per share. The tool should accept all three and convert between them.

And it has to treat scenarios as a first-class feature, not an afterthought. Because the value of a financial model is exploring what changes when your assumptions change.

The gap is real. The question is who fills it, and whether they build something that lasts.