Vena Solutions names long-time cloud sales leader Hunter Madeley as CEO

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One of North America’s most seasoned cloud software sales leaders is taking over as CEO of Toronto’s Vena Solutions Inc., seven months after the financial planning and analysis software firm attracted a nine-figure equity investment.

Hunter Madeley, previously the chief sales officer with Cambridge, Mass.,-based HubSpot Inc., and before that a sales vice-president with Salesforce.com Inc. and Automatic Data Processing Inc., will succeed co-founder Don Mal at a time of high interest in Vena’s sector.

Last year, Vena’s larger competitor, Silicon Valley-based Adaptive Insights, was purchased by software giant Workday Inc. for US$1.55-billion while another, San Francisco’s Anaplan Inc., went public. In January, two U.S. private equity firms, JMI Equity and existing backer Centana Growth Partners made a $115-million equity investment in Vena, valuing it in excess of $300-million.

Mr. Madeley’s senior sales experience with fast-growing cloud-based software companies “hit the standard we were looking for, and Don and the board recognized Hunter would be the perfect fit for Vena,” said JMI general partner Peter Arrowsmith, a Vena director.

Vena is on track to generate $50-million in revenue this year, up from about $30-million last year. It has more than 300 employees and 600-plus “mid-market” corporate customers with up to $2-billion in annual sales. With a new leader and financing, “we can accelerate beyond our initial expectations a year ago [of reaching $100-million in annual revenues] and maybe take this to a much bigger place,” Mr. Mal said.

Despite working in senior roles for U.S. companies, Mr. Madeley, a 53-year-old Toronto-area native, has kept his home base in Oakville, Ont. He had been thinking of “trying to do something with a Canadian-founded company” when JMI, one of the top U.S. investors in Canadian tech, approached him about the Vena job.

Mr. Madeley joined HubSpot as chief sales officer in 2014 when it was generating US$80-million in sales; it is on track to top US$650-million this year. Mr. Madeley said Vena is at an earlier stage than when he joined HubSpot, but has similar potential. “There’s clear product-market fit, but in terms of determining the best market to go after, whether or not to think about adjacencies or different geographies, we’re still early enough in what are critical strategic decisions that need to be made.”

Mr. Mal, a veteran software salesman, co-founded Vena in 2011 with ex-IBM colleagues Rishi Grover and George Papayiannis shortly after the computing giant bought his former employer, Toronto-based software provider Clarity Systems. Seeing several startups try to disrupt the spreadsheet market dominated by Excel, the trio figured most corporate finance teams were content and familiar with the Microsoft software, but just wanted it to be better. They built a tool to effectively soup up Excel, so Vena customers could continue working with a familiar platform but get cloud capabilities similar to those offered by rivals, including the ability for multiple users to collaborate on one spreadsheet. That approach turned Vena into one of Canada’s fastest-growing companies, according to Deloitte.

This marks the second time Mr. Mal, 56, is retiring from Vena to return to his first love – playing in a rock and roll band. He left in May, 2018, but returned after his replacement Shawn Cadeau left for undisclosed personal reasons last fall. Mr. Mal agreed to stay until another replacement was found.

“I feel great leaving [Vena] in the state we’re in,” he said. “We’re in a really great place for someone like Hunter to come in and really be additive … to what we’re doing.”

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