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Anaplan sells cloud software that helps big companies plan, budget, and forecast their business.
Anaplan is a software company that helps big organizations plan their future. Its cloud platform lets finance teams, sales teams, and operations teams build detailed models of how their business works — what they will sell, what it will cost, how many people they need — and then change the assumptions to see what happens next. Think of it as a giant, shared spreadsheet that whole companies can use at once, without it collapsing under its own weight.
The business runs on subscriptions. Customers pay Anaplan every year to use the software, and the biggest ones pay a lot because planning touches so many parts of a company. The pitch is speed and coordination: instead of dozens of disconnected spreadsheets emailed back and forth, everyone works from one live model. That is why large enterprises in consumer goods, manufacturing, financial services, and technology are the core customers. Competitors include big planning suites from Oracle and SAP, plus newer cloud tools from companies like Workday and Salesforce — though Anaplan's specialty is the hard, interconnected planning problems those general tools handle less well. Anaplan's own story took a dramatic turn. It listed its shares on the New York Stock Exchange in 2018, then became a takeover target. In 2022, private equity firm Thoma Bravo agreed to buy the company for roughly $10.7 billion, and the deal closed later that year. Anaplan is now privately owned by Thoma Bravo, which means its shares no longer trade on any exchange and outside investors can't buy them. Thoma Bravo is a software specialist, and the bet was that Anaplan's recurring subscription revenue and enterprise customer base were worth more than the public market was paying.
For a private company, the interesting question is what happens next. Thoma Bravo typically pushes portfolio companies to grow more profitably, cut costs, and sharpen the product, with an eye toward eventually selling the business or taking it public again. Anaplan sits in a useful spot: planning and forecasting software is sticky, because once a company builds its models inside a tool, ripping it out is painful. The risk is that giants like Microsoft keep bundling planning features into tools customers already own, making it harder for a specialist to justify its price.
Saved answer · last researched 15 Nov 2026