By tracing retention through 200 customer calls, onboarding flows, and product gaps, Vallurupalli realized the breakthrough wasn’t a single metric but the journey itself. His holistic diagnosis reframed retention as a system problem—shaping Airbase’s cross-functional fixes and guiding its existing-revenue engine through scale.
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Now Watch Our complete Episode Featuring CFO Aneal Vallurupalli of Drata
In this conversation, Drata CFO Aneal Vallurupalli explains why he sees finance as the organization’s “so-what” engine—clarifying decisions, removing blockers, and accelerating execution. He reflects on lessons from scaling Airbase and why Drata’s product-market pull and trust-management mission drew him in. Aneal describes his early focus on unblocking stalled initiatives, pressure-testing segment-level GTM metrics, and building finance as an unlocker for global expansion and multi-product growth. He also shares how he evaluates AI tools at both the workflow and data-warehouse layers. Throughout, curiosity and ruthless prioritization anchor his leadership in fast-moving software environments.
| CFO’s Strategy Playbook |
|---|
| • Turn finance into a company-wide unlocker. |
| • Start with pattern-matching, then ruthless prioritization. |
| • Chase systemic insight, not single-point metrics. |