Kat Orekhova

Co-Founder & CEO Vareto

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Kat Orekhova is co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Vareto, a strategic finance platform that handles enterprise planning, reporting and operational decision-making. She founded the company in 2020 with Lalit Singh after a career that ran from academic mathematics through Facebook’s data organization and into product leadership, and the company is a direct expression of that path: Vareto exists because she spent years inside one of the world’s most data-rich companies watching finance teams do sophisticated planning work on tooling that had not kept pace. At Facebook she built the first data science team embedded inside the FP&A function and subsequently ran revenue forecasting and analytics for the core business — the specific job Vareto now sells software for. The company came out of stealth in October 2021 with $24 million backed by GV and Menlo Ventures, and Orekhova is also an active early-stage investor, having scouted for Sequoia Capital and served as a general partner at Darkmode Ventures.

Career Highlights

• Co-founder and CEO of Vareto, founded in 2020 with Lalit Singh.
• Brought Vareto out of stealth in October 2021 with $24 million total funding: a $4.2 million seed led by Menlo Ventures in mid-2020 and a $20 million Series A led by GV, plus around 40 angel investors including unicorn founders and CFOs.
• Built Facebook’s first data science team embedded inside FP&A, moving the company’s forecasting cycle from monthly to daily.
• Head of Revenue Forecasting and Analytics at Facebook from 2015, owning reporting, forecasting and planning for the core business.
• Manager of data science and product for ads performance at Facebook from 2012, shipping products including Ads Scheduling and Accelerated Delivery.
• Head of Product at Ironclad, the contract lifecycle management company.
• Venture scout for Sequoia Capital and General Partner at Darkmode Ventures.

Professional Journey

Orekhova came to technology from mathematics rather than from business. She took her undergraduate degree in mathematics at Yale and a master’s in mathematics at the University of Oxford, and began doctoral work before deciding to leave academia for industry — an unusual entry point that she has described as the backstory shaping how she approaches finance problems.

She joined Facebook in 2012 as a manager in data science and product, leading a team focused on advertising performance and shipping products including Ads Scheduling and Accelerated Delivery. That work sat at the intersection of quantitative analysis and product decisions, and it positioned her for an unusual internal move: building a data science team inside the finance organization. Facebook had not previously embedded data scientists within FP&A, and the team she built was the company’s first. The practical consequence was a shift in how the company forecast its own revenue, compressing the forecasting cycle from monthly to daily. In 2015 she became Head of Revenue Forecasting and Analytics, taking responsibility for reporting, forecasting and planning across Facebook’s core business at a period of very rapid growth.

She left Facebook for a product leadership role, serving as Head of Product at Ironclad, the contract lifecycle management company, which broadened her experience from analytics into enterprise product ownership. Alongside operating roles she became an active early-stage investor, working as a scout for Sequoia Capital and later as a General Partner at Darkmode Ventures.

In 2020 she co-founded Vareto with Lalit Singh, on the observation that the needs of FP&A teams were not met by existing software — a judgement she was unusually well placed to make, having run exactly that function at scale. Menlo Ventures led a $4.2 million seed in the summer of 2020. The company built quietly for roughly a year before emerging from stealth in October 2021 with a $20 million Series A led by GV, taking total funding to $24 million and drawing in a large group of angel investors including startup founders and chief financial officers — the latter being, in effect, the company’s target buyer. Vareto’s product covers budget forecasting, headcount planning, P&L reporting, revenue forecasting and capacity planning, with the stated aim of establishing a single source of performance data and removing the manual work that consumes finance teams’ time.

Education

Yale University

Bachelor’s degree, Mathematics

University of Oxford

Master’s degree, Mathematics

She subsequently began doctoral work in mathematics before leaving academia for industry. No source names the institution where that doctoral work was undertaken, so it is not recorded as a separate entry.